Clear days on the publishing front . . .
. . . a title I believe I’ve stolen from The New Yorker, which used to publish lovely little bottom-of-column fillers about various insanities of modern life, including publishing life.
The following is an excerpt from Peter’s A BONE FROM A DRY SEA. The novel is two stories: one about an ancient prehistory when humans were, perhaps, first becoming human; and one about a modern archaeological dig that is discovering those early almost-humans’ remains. Each story features one of Peter’s signature scarily intelligent preadolescent girls, who sort out the slow local grown-ups, because the grown-ups are incapable of doing it for themselves. This bit is from the prehistoric story; the tribe has just successfully hunted a shoal of fish with the help of some dolphins.
Read carefully, there will be a test in a minute.*
. . . Twice more the cycle was repeated before the remains of the shoal escaped, scurrying along below the southern crags. As Li stood panting on the rock spit two of the dolphins came cruising through the clear water beside her. All around her lay dead and dying fish. She picked a couple up and flung them out, and the dolphins rose and took them just as they hit the surface. Almost at once the other dolphins arrived and hung below her, waiting expectantly. Ma-ma, Hooa, and Rawi were already harvesting the fish on the other side of the [harbour] entrance. Goor was carrying one up for Presh. The ones this side, Li felt, were rightly the dolphins’ share.
When she had all but cleared the rocks around her she picked up the last two, slid down into the water, and kicked gently toward the dolphins. They backed away, so she waited, treading water, with a fish held in each hand until they became inquisitive and drifted in. Two of them took the fish, but suddenly they backed away again.
Goor had appeared beside her. She made a Be still sign and then they waited, rising to the surface only when they needed air. Li knew the dolphins were still nearby, because of the sounds they made, their wailing whistles and clicks, call and answer, filling the sea around her. Shadowy shapes loomed, neared, took shape, came close, circled until she could stroke the long flanks as they passed, and returned to caress themselves against her body.
Then they swam together, dolphins and people, through the greeny-golden sea world, not in a wild dance full of rush and foam but in a slow, close, gentle weaving of bodies in the friendly water, while the dolphins’ song went on and on, filling the sea like the wavering sunlight. Li understood it to be song because the only sound she knew at all like it was the song of the tribe waking in the morning to greet the returning day.
The dolphins left without a signal, but the song continued in the water, dwindling as it went, until they rounded a headland and it was lost. Li and Goor waited a long while, hoping, but they didn’t come back.
Subj: Pancake permission request
From: MFidgit@FamousWriterAgency.co.uk
To: FamousWriter@thingummy.com
Dear Peter,
I hope you are well. We’ve had a permission request from the publisher Pancake, who would like to include an extract of 792 words from A BONE FROM A DRY SEA on their website http://www.politicalcorrectnessrunmad.com/ and as part of their secured on-line testing through that site. The material would be available for the academic year 2010-2011. We would suggest a fee of US$notnearlyenough. Please do let me know if you’re happy for this to go ahead on these terms.
Best wishes,
Melusine Fidgit
Assistant to the Hon. Fabian Thrib, Famous Writer Agent
Subj: Re: Pancake permission request
From: FamousWriter@Thingummy.com
To: MFidgit@FamousWriterAgency.co.uk
Thanks for sending me the extract from BONE that Pancake want. I see that they’ve marked the word “Caress” “edit”. I’d much rather they left it as it is, but if they still want to change it would they please consult me about how they do it. Thanks, PD
Subj: Dickinson permission
From: MFidgit@FamousWriterAgency.co.uk
To: FamousWriter@Thingummy.com
Dear Peter,
Further to your email about the use of the word ‘caress’ in the permission extract, here is the response from the American publisher. How would you like us to respond? We’d be quite happy to insist that they use the word as originally written! But if you’re happy for them to run some suggested compromises past you, then please let me know.
Best wishes,
Melusine
From: Elspeth WinkleTo: Melusine Fidgit
Subject: RE: DICKINSON permission
Melusine,
Thank you for your email. The word “CARESS” is a “no-no word” in the assessment test development world. It cannot be used. I understand Mr. Dickinson and his concerns. However, if that word is not edited out, we will not be able to use the work.
When the passages are presented to our client for passage review, many committees will scrutinize each work, looking for all kinds of potential problems and sensitivities. Since the taxpayers’ money is used, the entire populace must be taken into consideration. That can get pretty ridiculous sometimes, but that is the world in which we are trying to function.
Elspeth
Elspeth Winkle
Permissions - Intellectual Properties
Pancake Publishing
I was grist to a similar mill when HERO was young: after it won the Newbery it came up a lot for textbook excerpts. I was an intransigent brute, however, and refused to let them change ‘witchwoman’–which kept me out of at least one textbook. And, you know, what were they going to change it to? Elf? Gnome? Nice old lady? Peter’s going to let them change caress, but he’s asked if there’s a list of the no no words. Stay tuned.
* But any typos are my typing
Blog housekeeping
Item one: I mention this in the comments occasionally but the message is failing to percolate and furthermore people forget. Hey! Forgetting is my job! I don’t read or answer comments from the front end, at the bottoms of their entries, but in one long combined list at the back end of site admin. This is faster for me to deal with and I’m afraid it’s all about faster. I don’t have time to answer comments as it is, I just enjoy it.* But from there I can’t easily track back to previous comments on a thread; you’re supposed to be able to click through to ‘view all’ but it doesn’t work–and I don’t have time to hunt around. Therefore would you please copy and paste some hint what we’re talking about if you’re continuing a conversation? (Even if it’s a conversation with someone else . . . It’s a public blog, and I like to eavesdrop.)
Item two: please remember that I haven’t a clue about site running, maintenance, adjustment, blah. I can barely copy and paste entries, load photos** and answer comments. All such remarks and queries should go to Blogmom. Something like the counter clock it makes sense to ask me because I might not want one for some reason . . . but generally speaking please feel free to leave me out of the tech loop. I occasionally get emails from people who want to make helpful suggestions and I sit there staring at this stuff thinking ‘you have mistaken me for someone who runs her own blog. Permit me to disillusion you’.
Item three: It really bothers me that Anonymous is still putting in so regular an appearance in the comments. I’m aware that there’s some wrinkle in WordPress that means this happens more easily than it should, and again, people forget or are away from home or on a new computer.*** There are still far too many anonymice. This may be a bit deranged, but anonymous to me is anti-community, and this is, for better or sillier, a community.† Please feel free to create an alternative personality with a name borrowed from your favourite novel–as long as you read books and are nice to the rest of us you’re welcome here. While the Robin McKinley you see here is certainly familiar to anyone who knows me in three dimensions, I would be the first to declare she’s had a certain amount of spin put on her.†† And I don’t care if you belong officially or not: but if WordPress isn’t providing you with a name automagically please think of a unique identifying glob of symbols that suits/amuses you and sign it at the bottom.
Item four: And, speaking of the iniquities of WordPress, it eats comments occasionally. I’ve written maybe half a dozen that simply never appeared. Sometimes I get that confounded ‘slow down, you’re posting too fast’ message. Sometimes a comment . . . just doesn’t appear. What happens a good deal oftener is that something I’ve unscreened rescreens itself again. I do take a quick troll through and look for these, but inevitably I’m not catching all of them. If you’ve posted something, ahem, innocuous, and it’s never materialised . . . send it again. The only ones I delete are . . . um . . . rude. Or hilariously over-personal.††† But remember also that I usually only burn through here and do the unscreening once a day. If you posted just as I was checking out the night/morning before, you’ll have twenty-four hours till it emerges blinking into the computer ether.
PS: I was reading the summer issue of BRITISH HORSE over supper. There was a review of a book on riding that ended like this: Would I advise you to buy it? Yes and no. Yes, because . . . it would be a useful book for the newcomer to riding . . . and a worthwhile read for the student instructor. No because it’s an e-book–I do like a book I can pull off the shelf and refer to at a moment’s notice. Perhaps the author can be persuaded to publish the book in a more traditional form?
Hmmm.
And has anyone been to Baen’s Bar recently? Several of you–including Ithilien in her magisterial post on e-books–have mentioned it as an example of what on line bookishness can do, so I tried to go investigate. The opening page says they’ve moved the furniture and everyone has to re-login. I’m new anyway, so I created an account, dutifully responded to the official email . . . and it wouldn’t let me in. It denied the password I had been told I could choose, and reenter to confirm . . . and when I gave up and asked them to send it to me‡, it was one of those automated-gibberish collections of letters and numbers. . . and it wouldn’t accept that one either. Whereupon the noise level around here increased abruptly.
Right. I’m going back to a nice paper book right now.
* * *
* Mostly. Occasionally, at 2 am . . .
** And this rarely does not involve screaming
*** I hadn’t realised that I hadn’t checked in here from my newest littlest cutest knapsackiest computer and I was using it at the mews while the usual mews laptop was at the Computer Spa having mudpacks and saunas, and I signed on and it wouldn’t let me in. Paaaaanic.
† I know I’ve said this before, but I’ll probably say it again. I was so not expecting this when I took this blog schtick on. Community? On line? With a bunch of people you’ve never met? Come on. I am not a character in funny font in a Douglas Coupland novel.
†† Sometimes I can hear fairy laughter echoing through the ether when I post.
††† Do you really think I’m going to list everyone I’ve been to bed with, ages, genders, and success levels? I was laughing for days after that one. –It might be worth noting that obtrusiveness about my private life will mostly make me laugh. Obtrusiveness about my books . . . it’s a rare reader who truly gets alongside the author of a book. This is the source of my answer to the question ‘What single thing would improve the quality of your life most?’ which is ‘That readers would learn the difference between ‘this book didn’t work for me’ and ‘this book sucks dead bears’. ’ This is in the Imaginary Interview on the old web site, and will no doubt reappear on the new one.
‡ I know I’m middle-aged, crumbly, and forgetful, but even I would find it challenging to forget the password I had only just chosen ten seconds ago
More ebooks
Someone suggested a few days ago that if I wanted to keep the ebook thread going I should ask Blogmom to lift the three-day comment proscription. Except that I was going to have posted about ebooks again before the three days were up. Oops. Anyway, here’s some of the stuff I wanted to pass on to you:
http://www.danutakean.com/blog/?p=233 *
. . . which is about ereaders as a fashion statement, and how none of them make one yet. The article is a year and a half old, but it seems to me still true. I have a weird sort of techno lust/phobia thing going on all at once, like Laocoön and his snakes, about a lot of shiny new toys, including ebooks and their ereaders. If they get a few crucial bits sorted–like this business of taking a second or two to turn a page: no way am I going to put up with this–I will certainly buy one of the one and a lot of the others to put in it. Not having to choose what to take with me on a long trip** is way too seductive. At the same time, as a woman who has 1,000,000 pairs of Converse All Stars in decorator colours, I was disappointed by Hannah and Cormac’s ebook readers, however thrilling they were in other ways, when they flourished them at me last April, because they were so boring to look at. I dunno, though, it took decades before you could get a computer in anything but Pentagon corridor grey or mental institution beige, and the true revolution, which would include snap-on covers to coordinate with your mood***, has still not arrived. And I somehow manage to put up with computers. Although ‘put up with’ is perhaps a trifle relative.
More than one of you mentioned reading Neil Gaiman’s AMERICAN GODS for free on line. Here’s the story:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/feb/12/news.richardlea
And here’s some of what Neil said about it:
http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2008_02_01_archive.html
But the part I found most interesting is here:
http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2008/03/more-on-free-and-suchlike.html
He’s answering a bookseller who is appalled that he’s been giving away AMERICAN GODS, and he says:
I don’t see this as either they get it for free or they come and buy it from you. I see it as Where do you get the people who come in and buy the books that keep you in business from?†
Ah. Hmm.
Meanwhile, ebooks are coming to England; the iLiad†† is already here and the Sony reader is coming. There was an article in one of the Sunday supps on the pro and the con: †††
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/jul/27/ebooks3
‘What we’re seeing is the creation of a new art form’
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/jul/27/ebooks
‘It made me feel alienated from the books that I know well’
And to my considerable dismay I’m finding myself more in sympathy with the young whippersnapper who likes ebooks over the gentleman of mature years who does not. I’m even on his side and he still sounds backward and truculent. I’d post you links to the sidebars but I can’t: I had enough trouble finding the second, anti-, link–I have the flapdoodling newspaper in front of me so I can type in exactly what I want in the search window and it still took several tries to come up; the pro- article popped up top of the list immediately. Hmm: paranoid conspiracy alert. However I entirely agree with Lynne Truss who says ‘in a world of ebooks, you won’t be able to see what people are reading. I really enjoy clocking what everyone’s got with them on the train.’ Yes. And even nicer is just that there (usually) are so many people reading on the train. Although some of them are already doing it on their laptops and PDAs.‡ PDAs are even more hopeless than ereaders, but you can sometimes get an identifying squint at a laptop screen. I’ve never seen a stranger reading a novel on a laptop though.
Anyone with too much time on their hands‡‡ could type in ‘ebooks’ on the Guardian [UK newspaper] web site. Quite a bit of interesting stuff comes up. I liked this article, which is more about book sites than about ebooks:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2007/jun/21/comment.guardianweeklytechnologysection
But it’s the last paragraph that really catches my eye:
‘As these book sites get bigger they will suddenly realise the leverage that their members have given them. It is not completely fanciful to speculate that they could use their huge user bases to negotiate for cheaper books directly with the publishers rather than intermediaries. Watch out, Amazon.’
Yesssssss. I like the idea of a revolution where Goliath goes down with a stone in his eye.
More later . . .
* * *
* I’ve been having the occasional quick glance at her blog since I read her entry on blogging when I was floundering around a year ago with the prospect of beginning a blog oppressing me. Most of which entry, like the one I’m citing above, I think still makes a lot of sense, although I’m sure viewing it from a different angle than I did when it was newly hung in September 2007: http://www.danutakean.com/blog/?p=233
** Like I’m ever going to go on a long trip again.^ Well, a hop up to London for half a day. Even a day-trip train journey is long when you’ve got the wrong reading material with you. And what about those diabolical expeditions when your plane is cancelled, and you and the rest of the cattle get herded into the nearest ugly airport hotel, given food vouchers insufficient to feed an anorexic Chihuahua, denied access to your checked-in luggage . . . and while you hang around waiting for something to happen you run out of anything to read?
^ Note: hellhounds are not eating. Also again. Well, they’re not eating enough. We’re not quite to the stage that I’m afraid to be seen on the street with them because someone will send the RSPCA around for failure to feed, but we’re getting there. Hey, if the RSPCA could get them to eat. . . .
*** Or possibly your shoes
† I can’t remember where this is from–somewhere on Neil’s blog as I was looking for ebook stuff–but if you don’t see the link there yourself, be sure to check out:
http://cjsd.blogspot.com/2008/02/ten-simple-rules-for-graduate-students.html
Which, just by the way, is Dr Horrible to the life, and when it comes out on DVD we should all scrutinize the credits for an acknowledgement.
†† Can anyone tell me why it has this idiotic name? I made a fast pass through Google and Wiki and all I can find is that that is its name, not why. I’m already not going to buy it, and that was before I found out the price.
††† And, speaking of names, John Sutherland, he of CAN JANE EYRE BE HAPPY and IS HEATHCLIFF A MURDERER^ fame, says ‘[ebooks are] a great invention in search of a name . . . E-readers are not storage devices but portals to new literary forms . . . How about calling them “Stargates”?’ The Observer [newspaper], which probably just wants a good contest but seems to be confusing ebook with ereader, is running a competition for best name for . . . one or the other, calling it an ebook but suggesting that Sutherland’s suggestion can be improved on. Huh? I feel that whoever wrote this is exposing an origin somewhere in Huxley’s Gamma level, if not Delta. Of course the brave new world didn’t have ebooks because reading is anti-social. Furthermore I like ‘Stargates’.
^ Yes. And an irritating prat with it.
‡ Will Self, however, who . . . okay, okay, Pollyanna is putting a bag over my head here again, cheez she takes her responsibilities seriously . . . anyway, Will Self says ‘ . . . if enough people . . . use them, the consequences for writers are . . . disastrous’. Uh. Either he’s not paying attention, or he needs a new agent.
‡‡ Can I have some??????? Free signed books for the rest of my life!!!!
Voyeur
It’s a good thing I looked at my diary this morning because tonight was Penelope’s* writing group night. She’d asked me weeks ago if I’d come talk to her group about being a professional writer and I said certainly, wrote it down, fortunately, and then forgot. So I scrambled around this afternoon finding props–Editions through the Ages kind of thing, and sample page proofs, copyedited ms, galleys, etc, much hampered by the fact that most of this is in taped-up, erratically labelled boxes in the attic at Third House. My Editions through the Ages of BEAUTY is not the same without the (French) edition of the naked girl covered in blue feathers or the (American) mass market edition of the simpering little git with the pink horns growing out of her head–most of which I left in the car, but it’s reassuring to know you have a back up plan if no one wants to talk to you.
Turns out they start their evenings with a Writing Exercise. Gods. What an unnatural concept. However, I am always up for a new adventure.** This is what you might call the extrapolated version of what I wrote:
So I’m supposed to be doing a writing EXERCISE. For the first time in forty years or so. I can probably think of other things I’d rather be doing for the first time in forty years.*** I drop out of creative writing groups. The group part is fine† but the creative writing part is . . . unh. I’ve never taken direction well. And I’ve elsewhere compared my writing process to trying to stay on a runaway horse while taking notes on the scenery.
They gave me the Writer’s Block–which I’d given Penelope a year or so ago when she had hit a creative rough patch–which is a tiny square block of a book with an illustration and a bit of text on every two-page spread. Thus we will choose our exercise topic. Open at random and . . . I opened to a man with binoculars and the word ‘voyeur’. So, who is voyeuring whom? I can do the public thing when required, but it’s easier when I don’t know anybody–and can feel relatively secure in not ever meeting any of them in the street tomorrow or next week, since I live several hundred to several thousand miles away††–when the veneer of someone else, someone not me, some public author figure, can be allowed to be complete. So they are voyeuring me, although I’m here voluntarily.
But I’m voyeuring them too, because I’m going to go home and get a blog entry out of it.††† I’m a good girl, however, so the only person I’ll be rude about is me‡. But I had it half thought out before I came: Outside View of Famous Writer (as I was rather unnervingly greeted at the door) Robin McKinley: Needs a haircut. Has eczema on her chin‡‡ and tea stains on her teeth and she should clean her fingernails after she’s been gardening.‡‡‡ And what’s that funny smell?
Oh. Well, the sterilised chickensh*t purveyors were supposed to ring me before they delivered ten bags of variously smelly plant nutritional substances, and they didn’t. I can’t leave the stuff in the driveway–they may be sterilised but golly do they pong–because I prefer to stay on good terms with my neighbours. But as a result I can’t wear my Chapter Seventeen t shirt till it has been divested of its chicken connection, and I put it on for the writing group. Thus reality impinges on literature, as it so often does.
I think it went okay. The everyday ‘I’ tends to hide under the bed while the extrovert personality construct does her schtick. Most of the questions were pretty normal§ but there were a few nonplussers. A few people admitted to having looked me up on the web before this meeting, but the only one of my books I was asked about was BLACK BEAUTY. Yes, I did a hatchet job on Anna Sewall§§ many years ago so it could be beautifully illustrated by Susan Jeffers, and as a picture book intro for the littlest pony clubbers I think it works just fine, and I hope they all grew up to read the original. But it’s been out of print for yonks and it’s not exactly a seminal work. Someone else said he’d been reading my blog and I was so angry about everything. Uh? I am? I certainly do anger and I’m aware I do it rather liberally but as the thing to single out of this blog . . . well, that was a nonplusser.
And one poor woman asked me what was the best book I’d read in the last six months and of course my mind went blank instantly. And then I said, no, I know! Neil Gaiman’s THE GRAVEYARD BOOK and it’s not available till the end of October! Mwa ha ha ha ha ha!
* * *
* And to anyone who was there, and is only reading this to see what I’m going to say about all of you^, yes, Penelope. Everyone on this blog but Peter and me has an alias. Which is also why I’m not going to say anything about you. The only person’s privacy I’m allowed to invade is my own. Peter also allows certain incursions.
^ Hint: nothing.
** No I’m not! What am I saying!
*** Reading LORD OF THE RINGS for the first time. Although that’s forty-five years.
† Sometimes. Which is another tale for another day. With the names changed to protect the ugly evil ratbags.
†† I do try not to take advantage of this
††† Yes I did have to read mine out, like everyone else, and at this point everyone laughed
‡ In the original I add: especially if I have to read my writing exercise to the group–then I’ll really be polite
‡‡ Which is worse from having eaten cheese last night, idiot woman, what was she thinking? She was thinking, that’s a very nice piece of Brie that my idiot husband bought for my friend’s visit last weekend and then forgot to make her take away with her and it’s a pity to waste it. What were cheese-eating neighbours invented for? Good grief.
‡‡‡ I spend my life cleaning my fingernails. I think I have little tiny Dirt Magnets embedded on the tips of my fingers.
§ Including one that I’d better start getting used to: Why do you write a blog?
§§ Except for a few connective ‘buts’ and ‘ands’ they’re all her words. There are just a lot fewer of them.
Chalice begins . . .
Because she was Chalice she stood at the front door with the Grand Seneschal, the Overlord’s agent and the Prelate, all of whom were carefully ignoring her. But she was Chalice, and it was from her hand the Master would take the welcome cup.
From the front door of the House, at the top of the magnificent curling sweep of stair, she could see over the heads of the crowd. The rest of the Circle stood stiffly and formally at the foot of the stair with the first Houseman and the head gardener, but nearly the entire citizenry of the demesne seemed to have found an excuse to be somewhere in or near the House or lining the long drive from the gates today.
Their new Master was coming home: the Master thought lost or irrecoverable. The Master who, as younger brother of the previous Master, had been sent off to the priests of Fire, to get rid of him. Third and fourth brothers of Masters were often similarly disposed of, but the solitary brother of an unmarried Master without other Heir should not have been dealt with so summarily. So the Master had been told. But the two brothers hated each other, and the younger one was given to the priests of Fire. That had been seven years ago.
A little over six years later the Master died, still without other Heir. The Grand Seneschal had sent immediately to the priests of Fire to say that there was urgent need of the younger brother of the Master of Willowlands, for the Master had died without having produced a son. Such a request—a plea—had never been made before. Once someone has gone to the Elemental priests, they do not return.
But a demesne must have its Master. And a change of family, of bloodline, in any demesne, upsets all, often for generations, till the new family has settled into its charge. The nearest other living relative of the old Master of Willowlands was a fourth cousin who had already married someone unsuitable and had three children by her. The priests of Fire said they would see what they could do, but they promised nothing. The younger brother of the old Master had just crossed into the third level, and by the third level Elemental priests can no longer live among ordinary humans.
But six weeks ago the Grand Seneschal had received another message from the priests of Fire: that the Master of Willowlands was coming home. It would not be an easy Mastership, and the priests were not sure it was even possible, but the Master himself felt the responsibility to his demesne, and he was determined to try.
Mirasol—straining her eyes toward the gate, partly as a way to ignore the three men who were ignoring her—remembered the younger brother: his strength of purpose, his feeling of obligation to the demesne, his feeling for the demesne. It was what the brothers had quarrelled about. The elder brother had loved the power of the Mastership, not its duties, and he was not the least willing to bear lectures on his behaviour from his younger brother. She wasn’t surprised the younger brother was coming home, even from the third level of the priesthood of Fire.
She had dreamed of the message to the Grand Seneschal the night before it arrived: she had felt the fire and smelt the burning. She knew the Master would come. She knew too that the smell of burning was a warning, but she did not know of what. Might the demesne itself burn, or its new Master?
She could see only a little way down the drive as it curved toward the gates half a league distant. But she could see when people better placed than she for first sight of the arrival stiffened and stared. The three men standing with her drew themselves to attention.
She could hear carriage wheels now.
It will be all right, she told herself. It must be all right. She settled her shoulders with a tiny, invisible shake, and fractionally raised her chin.
Six horses drew the coach: four of them coal-black, clinker-black, two of them ashy grey. The coach itself was also black, but black was always fashionable among the great and grand and would draw no comment. But the curtains at these windows were drawn closed, and they too were black. A light flickered behind them, red and wavering, like firelight.
Again she smelt burning, but she did not know if she imagined it.
The welcoming of a new Master was a time of rejoicing. The ceremony of investiture was the official occasion, and after the rites were done there was an enormous banquet with musicians and dancing for everyone who belonged to the demesne—and for anyone else from any other demesne who wished to join in the festivities at the price of some enthusiastic contribution to toasts and cheers and acclamations. But the informal arrival of a Master should still be a happy moment. And she knew she was not the only person present who felt that the brothers had been born in the wrong order: it was the younger who would have made the better Master from the beginning.
But no one clapped or called. No one smiled. It was as if everyone was holding their breath.
The coach stopped in front of the House, where the gravel had been raked in a perfect circle, a symbol of good luck. Any coach wheels and any horses’ hooves would have broken the circle, splintered the careful spiral; that it should be so broken was a part of the welcome, like opening and pouring out the contents of a bottle of wine. There was no reason for her to feel uneasy, watching the horses dance as they halted, kicking pebbles every way, to feel that something fragile and vital was being destroyed.
The body of the coach rocked on its wheels, and little spurts of gravel pattered out from under them.
Then the door opened.
Perhaps she imagined the cloud of darkness like smoke that billowed out; no one else reacted, and she bit down on her own gulp of astonishment. And of sudden fear. She remembered the younger brother. She had not known him—it was not for such a one as she had been to know the Master’s family—but she had known a good deal of him. She had known more of him than of the Master, before the Master sent him away, because he was the one who rode or walked round the demesne, seeing that the fields and woods grew and throve, and the temples and places of power were serene and well tended. He was not tall and handsome and flashing-eyed like his older brother, but there was kindness and grace in him, and intelligence in his unremarkable brown eyes.
She knew little of the Elemental priests, nothing of their initiations, and only folk-tales of what the priesthoods did and were capable of. She knew that Fire frightened her worst, more than Earth or Air. And the Fire priests themselves had said that Willowlands’ new Master could no longer live among ordinary humans.
As the coach door swung back, one of the House servants jumped forward as if suddenly recalling himself, and lowered the steps. Two figures climbed carefully down. They both wore black capes with hoods that hid their faces, but they carried themselves and moved and looked around as anyone might. As any ordinary human might.
There was a collective letting-out of breath. Talisman, the tallest of the minor Circle, seemed suddenly shorter; Sunbrightener, who was the fattest, seemed fatter.
That was until the third figure climbed down from the coach.
He too wore a black cape with a hood, but the cape bulged and seethed weirdly around him, and he let himself carefully down the steps as if he did not know or could not remember how to use his feet for such an activity. The two figures who had climbed down first reached their hands to help him, holding him at the elbows and under the arms, but she felt, looking on, that their hands did not grasp quite where elbows and armpits should be.
He half limped, half rolled up the steps toward the House’s front door with his helpers still on his either side. She seemed to hear a distant roar, like a fire caught in a sudden updraft. She wanted to glance at the faces of the other people, the people who had come here this morning to catch a first glimpse of their new Master, wanted to see if they looked frightened or appalled. But she couldn’t drag her own gaze away from the great roiling black loom of the third figure coming toward her.
She felt the three men standing beside her struggling not to step back and away as she stepped forward. She had been clutching the welcome cup against her body so tightly that her stomach ached where the extravagantly ornamented brim had bitten into her. The roughness of the intricate overlay on the cup’s bowl gave her suddenly cold stiff fingers better purchase as she moved her hands to their proper places on its stem.
She was Chalice, and hers the first greeting.
The top step was a wide smooth half-moon of white stone before the door. There was plenty of space for her and him and his two aides, as well as the three men behind her, and the doorkeepers back farther yet, flanking the doorposts. She raised her cup, grateful that the weight of it prevented her hands from shaking, and looked down. Three faces turned up toward her, two of them brown and ordinary and worried-looking.
The third face was black, as black as the coal-coloured horses that drew the black coach, and its—his—eyes were red, flickering like fire around the black pupils. She recognised nothing in that face from her memories of the younger brother of the dead Master. She looked at him steadily, willing herself to see something—anything—that she could welcome as Master, and in the final seconds it took him to climb the last step, she saw what she needed to see: comprehension. He knew her for Chalice and knew she was there to welcome him, because he came as Master.
When he stood with her on the top step he gave a little shudder, or ripple, and his two aides dropped their hands and stepped back. As they let go of him she saw that they wore gloves. Her mouth was dry, as dry as if she had been eating ash, and she was slow to say the two important words: “Welcome, Master.”
She was slow, but he was slower. He should reach immediately to take the cup from her, hold it briefly over his head for everyone to see that he accepted it, taste its contents and hand it back to her. It was possible that he would thank her, but it was not necessary.
But he only stood, looking at her. The hood shadowed his shadow-dark face; she thought she was glad of it. He twitched, a tiny spasm, once, twice. Perhaps he was trying to raise his hands. The third time he succeeded, the sleeves of the cape juddering back as if blown by a wind, and she saw that he too wore gloves, long heavy ones, laced snugly to the elbows.
She could not give any Chalice cup to gloved hands. She looked back into his face—into the shadows where his face was. She did not know what to do. She thought she must have imagined the comprehension she had seen there a moment earlier; she could read no expression on that black face now.
Clumsily he raised his left hand and drew the fingers through the laces of the glove on his right. The cords fell away in uneven shards, as if charred. Slowly he peeled the glove away from his arm—and the heat of his flesh raged out at her. The air between them was almost too hot to breathe. Even more clumsily he raised his naked right hand, the fingertips glowing like embers, to touch the cup. She held her ground while the fingers of that fiery hand curled round the bowl of the cup inches from her face. The enamelled metal of the goblet grew uncomfortably warm against her skin and steam rose from the liquid within it.
The weight of the cup did not change and she supported it as he stood with his hand around it. He looked at it and back at her.
“What . . . do you give . . . me to drink?” His voice was as eerie as his appearance, but perfectly intelligible.
Her answer to this question had been in no record she had consulted about the rite of welcome; but then no one had ever welcomed a third-level Elemental priest as Master either. She had held her own against the preferences of the Prelate and the Grand Seneschal only because she was, in the end, Chalice, and they could not order her to give him the earthed wine customary for a welcome cup. But she had not expected to have to announce publicly her departure from tradition: only the Master himself would taste the contents of his welcome cup. She felt as if she were being wayward, unreasonable and oblivious all over again when she had to reply, “Water—plain water from the Ladywell—and a spoonful of honey, Master.”
She was sure—she was almost sure—she did not imagine it that he smiled. And it was only after her answer that she felt him begin to draw the cup toward himself. Still he did not—or could not—bear its weight, and so she carried it for him. Together they made only a faint gesture of holding it above his head, for the audience to see; and then she tipped it gently against his mouth, and saw him drink; and also saw a tiny rivulet run down by the side of his mouth and hiss off his chin, briefly leaving a fire-red tracing thread behind it.
He let her draw the cup back toward her again with his hand still around it. She looked again into his face and saw, though she could not have explained how she saw, that he was tired, tired almost to death; and so she knew that it was only weariness that made him clumsier still, that when he lifted his hand away from the cup, he was not able to do it cleanly, and his hand dropped a little, and glanced—only barely, fleetingly glanced—off the back of her hand, where it seared the thin flesh to the bone.
At the time it almost didn’t matter. She found that she had been half expecting something like it to happen, and did not flinch when it did. She lowered the goblet only a little bit hastily, and tucked the weight of it against her body again so that she could drop her wounded hand to her side and let the long sleeve of her robe cover the burn. This made it throb worse than if she could have held it up, but that couldn’t be helped. No one farther away than the three men behind her awaiting their turn—and possibly the Master’s two aides—would have seen anything, and she wished to keep it that way.
But the three men waiting just behind her would have seen. The Grand Seneschal might have kept his mouth shut for his own good—it was he who had negotiated with the priests of Fire in the first place, and he who had received the news that the priests did not believe what he was asking could be done. She didn’t know the Prelate well enough to guess after his motives, beyond a growing suspicion he had few of his own and preferred to borrow them from some stronger character. But the Overlord’s agent would have every reason to tell the tale—and doubtless had. While it would upset the balance of the entire country if one of the demesnes were realloted, the process of the reallotment would hugely increase this Overlord’s power, and bind the new Master to the Overlord with a political gratitude it would take generations of Masters and Overlords to bring into equilibrium again. And their current Overlord was a little too fond of political power—she among others believed—without such temptations as a Master who might burn his subjects by the touch of his hand.
By the end of the first day of the new Master’s return, the people she met were looking first at her right hand. Gossip travels as fast as fire. By then she had dressed and bandaged it, so there was nothing to see but the bandage; but that was enough. And there was no way to shrug off what had happened as an accident. Of course it had been an accident: no Master could remain Master who deliberately harmed any of his people. What had happened to her should be viewed as no worse or more significant than if one of his coach horses had shied and trodden on one of the onlookers: an unfortunate mishap. That’s all. But of course it was not, for it was not an accident that should have been able to happen. If the new Master were not a priest of Fire. If the new Master were still human.
“It is nothing,” she said to the people she caught looking at her hand. “It is nothing.” Sometimes she tried to smile. She’d smiled at Sama, when she’d asked for lint and salve; Sama was a Housewoman with a round, happy face and three children, and she and her children were excellent customers for Mirasol’s honey. “I was clumsy. It is no more than if I brushed my hand against a dish just out of the oven.”
“It don’t look like nothing,” said Sama, whose round face was not happy today. “And oven burns hurt.”
“Of course they hurt,” Mirasol said briskly, trying to be competent with one hand and failing. “But we bear them because we are clumsy—and because we still like our food cooked.”
Sama’s face closed a little more, but she did reach out to help Mirasol with her bandage.
“It is not as though we had had a chance to practise our roles,” Mirasol said, trying to make a joke, but she realised as soon as the words were out of her mouth they were a mistake. Usually a new Master was well known to the demesne; usually the Chalice’s welcome cup to the Master entering his House as Master for the first time was a formality only.
Usually a new Master was human.
“But—” Sama began.
“He is our Master,” said Mirasol firmly.
There was an uncomfortable pause while Sama finished tying up the bandage. When she was done she raised her eyes to Mirasol’s and said, “As Chalice wills.”
Mirasol almost blurted out, It’s not what I will! It is what has happened!
A few months ago she would have spoken so, spoken before she thought, a few months ago when her Chalicehood was still so new that every reminder of it was like a burn. But she was Chalice now, and all things had changed, herself most of all. Before the Chalice had chosen her, Sama would have argued with her; would have held her own opinion against Mirasol’s. She would not argue with her Chalice; it was her duty to accept the Chalice’s ruling.
Mirasol hoped she was right.
She told herself it would have been worse if it had been an ordinary accident like a coach horse blundering into the audience, because that would so clearly have been a bad omen. The new Master was a priest of Fire, and adjustments had to be made. That’s all. That’s all. She could not help the bandage on her hand, but once she realised there was no point in trying to hide it, she used that hand freely, as if it did not hurt her. She had to hope that the fixed expression on her face that this usage provoked—because it did hurt a great deal—only looked like the Chalice’s professional mask.
But if their new Master believed he could be Master, then she wanted him to have his chance. In the first place this was only her duty: the Master was the Master, but no Master could maintain his land without his Chalice. But in the second place she wanted this Master to grasp and hold because these first six months of her abrupt and lonely Chalicehood had been almost beyond her strength. She did not think she would be able to bear—to contain—the tumult if Willowlands were given a new, outblood Master; and she did not think this or any demesne could survive an outblood Master and a second disastrously new, inexperienced and untrained Chalice together.