AI generated image of Jan the Huntsman and Lady Tamara from The Bloody Briar
My story The Bloody Briar is now available at Swords and Sorcery magazine. It is another folktale mash-up, this time wholly European. Head over there and take a look.
Everyone will be familiar with some version of “The Briar Rose” (Sleeping Beauty), which I have intertwined with “Tam Lyn,” an originally Scottish story with variants retold throughout Europe.
For those not familiar with Tam Lyn, there is a thorough background on Wikipedia, or you can listen to a modern version of it, as performed by the late great Benjamin Zephaniah, accompanied by Eliza Carthy and the Imagined Village. It is well worth eight minutes of your time. The key themes are transformation and redemption, which I have blended with a reimagining of the backstory to Sleeping Beauty.
Mt previous folktale mash-up was based on two Sumatran stories. You can find The Hornbill and The Lame Horse in Fairy Tales Punk’d Vol 2
For more about my writing check out my Bibliography.
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The image accompanying this post was created using the WordPress AI image generator. This one took three prompts.
The origins of this story are a patchwork quilt. I have borrowed liberally from those around me in my university days, both my own alma mater of St Johns, and Homerton, home to many dear friends.
At its heart are my memories of Armand & Evi, both post grads. Their relative maturity and beautiful romance gave them a palpable aura, a sense that we were in the presence of something greater. He (A) was Turkish. She (E) was Greek Cypriot. A forbidden love that outstripped your Montagues and Capulets.
I recast them into a Pakistani origin Muslim boy (Samir) and a Northern Irish Catholic girl (Sorcha). Proximity makes the latter a little more accessible to me than Greece/Turkey. The former is home territory.
I modelled Sorcha’s look, if not her life, on a friend of a friend, someone whose social circle intersected with mine. She was exquisite in a way that leaves an impression that lasts thirty years. Sorcha’s mannerisms are more recent, drawn from listening closely to a colleague (I told her why).
Samir’s look I modelled on a chap I met on my first day at university. He left me an introductory note headed by a beautifully scripted greeting in Arabic. He was a medic so I barely saw him again over the next three years. For the story he wears my leather jacket.
Evi died of breast cancer the year after I graduated. If you have read my story “The Book of Condolence”, the opening and closing moments, with the narrator deciding what to write in the titular book, are purely autobiographical from Evi’s memorial service. The rest of course isn’t.
Threads from those lives and the geography of Cambridge are drawn together to make “Acts of Rebellion”. I should note here that during the 90s Homerton was a teacher training college, I understand it has evolved significantly since then.
I’m deeply grateful to Suspect for publishing it, and to Faith and Sharmini in particular for their sensitive and thoughtful editing.
I used the WordPress AI image generator for this post. It took two prompts to get it right.
Picture of the portrait of the Duke and Duchess of Urbino by Piero della Francesca, Uffizi Gallery, Florence. Source: me.
Down with all kings but King Ludd*
I have come to bury human creativity not to praise it.
My thoughts today are not with those employed in creative industries, but that army of creative people toiling away at what they love to do in the solitude of their own homes. I might get to the former another day.
Gen AI has launched a grenade into artistic circles and the lamentations have begun; an outpouring of opprobrium on the inauthenticity of the outputs. It makes nothing new, the critics cry, it can only plagiarise what has gone before. The end of the world is nigh.
And then we all laugh because the machines don’t understand hands, or how many legs someone should have.
Everything we do is derived from something else
All true. But imitation is also true of the majority of human artistic endeavour. Once in a generation we might get a genius, a Mozart or a Miami Sound Machine, that pushes art to a new level. If we get more than one it elevates the moment in history into a golden age. Everything else is derived, a pastiche, an homage when we admit we are doing it.
Most of what we produce is distinguished only by going to the effort of producing it. I count myself among the writers. The subtle difference between me and a non-writer is that I have extruded the wires of imagination and exploration into a basket of words on a page. I can’t claim to have advanced the human condition any more than infinitesimally, and certainly no more than any other writer had you chanced upon their work instead of mine.
Of course, I think I have the great [pick an identity] novel within me. I am spurred on by the belief that one day the stars will align and I will find that ecstatic link between brain and fingers, the perfect synchronicity of lungs and viscera that will deliver a draft of it onto the page.
Whether that moment arrives in my allotted span, who knows?
In the meantime, like every other artist out there, I weave together the sum total of my experiences, what I have read, what I have heard, my preferences, the what-ifs I am willing to ask myself and graft. Have I ever broken free of the seven basic plotlines? I doubt it. So too the painters following a style or school, the musicians starting out with the standards of their favourite bands before re-ordering the limited range of chords the human ear can hear. Ed Sheeran proved that in court. Don’t get me started on the internet poets and their tortured prose with added line breaks, there are no new thoughts there (they tell you in their bio they are a poet because how else would you know).
Let’s not call it copying, that sounds bad, instead let’s call it honouring what has gone before with imitation. You know the quote:
Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery that mediocrity can pay to greatness (Oscar Wilde)
Sound and fury, signifying nothing
What happens to all that output? Mostly nothing. Speaking for the writers, the acceptance rates of most publishers are one in a hundred. Much of that is free, or paid a small honorarium, in tiny journals that sustain themselves with a few thousand readers and then die. God bless those beautiful souls who launch them. The stories will lapse into obscurity and the best we can hope for is that they will be discovered by grandchildren in a dusty attic one day.
AI will improve. Like any dedicated art student, it will learn to do hands. All the time my fellows and I stare at a blank page, nursing that combination of expectation and despair, some scoundrel will have thrown half a dozen prompts into a tool and generated a pile of perfectly readable fare. As slush readers and editors drown under the weight of these unearned stories, these manufactured works, the competition for the precious few paying berths will intensify, and that most valuable resource for all of us – the audience -will be presented with an array of what appear to be substitutes.
So what?
If the audience are served, does it matter how?
Perhaps not. You pays your money and you takes your choice. This is the irrefutable logic of the market. Caveat emptor and all that.
Except most of the writers I know are not in it for the money. Apart from a tiny fraction at the top of the bestseller lists there just isn’t enough in it. We all have jobs or have retired from a lifetime of wage slavery. It’s this fact that unlocks the reason why this all matters.
Price or value?
AI may bring economic efficiency to the production of creative stuff. Hours sweating over what would be humdrum anyway replaced by a few keystrokes and all that human time available to drive an Uber instead. Progress.
But this is not a game of quantity and cost. However much I might aspire to be Ondaatje, somewhere in what I write is a sliver of me, my experience, my reaction to the world. We make art for the chance, however slim, to affect someone else with what has affected us. Whether that is a smile, a tear or just minutes of pleasurable distraction from everything else in their world while they visit ours.
Making art is a narcotic. There is a joyful exhaustion that comes with laying down a first draft. The knowledge that the bones of what will become a story are present, there is something to hone and craft. Closing the file on something ready to share with the world is a sense of fulfilment. Getting an acceptance after a dozen rejections is a pure high – another human being has seen something of value in what we have made. A review or just some positive feedback is a shot of adrenalin.
Very rarely does it pay the bills.
Death of Chatterton by Henry Wallis
We are nothing if not connected
We make things and share them with others because it is how we connect with the rest of the species. It is bound up in our DNA. Around those early campfires of our ancestors were the storytellers, spinning the tales of our shared humanity, the things we value, the limits we accept. Accompanied by a hide drum. Recorded with lines drawn on a cave wall.
In time the reader may not be able to tell if the words they read, the painting they view, the music they listen to are made by hand or machine. Individually they may not care, but collectively they should. One is the product of genuine human experience, atomistic, populated with diverging perspectives, outliers and outsiders. The other is an agglomeration of shadows, a vast exercise of averaging in which the individual is lost. Without people at the heart of creation the world will be a greyer, desaturated place. Like the transition from analog to digital, AI generated art will sacrifice depth and richness on the altar of efficiency. We will lose another part of what binds us.
Economists call this sort of intangible benefit, this thing that sits above the commerce of product and price, an externality. Markets are notoriously bad at dealing with them. It takes societies, and the governments that represent them to put a marker down and say: this matters too.
And what if, in an age of oversupply of things poured out of the GPTs, the next toddler Mozart does not run their sticky fingers over a keyboard, or sketches of the next Raphael, with all too few years among us, are buried under prompt generated fabrications?
AI will improve, I have no doubt. It may well outstrip the massed ranks of scribblers, daubers and buskers on some measures of quality. But it does not itself live, feel and express. In the end, its product is just that – a product. It is not real. Without the artist, without the toil, without the desire we risk being left flailing around in a world of ersatz emotions and synthetic understanding.
Untamed, AI will leave us diminished.
Where there is life there is hope
And yet…
I’m old enough to remember the advent of sampling. Tank Fly Boss Walk Jam Nitty Gritty and all that. Somehow people still find meaning in music even if it is recorded and clipped and replayed with other bits, even if no horsehair bow is drawn across a real string and instead a note, compete with minor distortions and aberrations is played with a keystroke.
We’ve lived through disruptions in how we connect and we continue to do so. AI is here to stay, maybe we just need to learn how to communicate with each other through it.
End
*Song for the Luddites, Lord Byron
I’ve not credited the Shakespeare quotes and borrowings, if you’re here you’ll recognise them.
As ever, all opinions are strictly my own and do not represent those of employers past or present.
Sometime in 2014 I had my first experience with an anechoic chamber. This is a room with surfaces that are designed to stop the reflection of sound and electromagnetic waves. What you feel when you walk in is a deadness, no timbre or resonance when you talk. I didn’t stay long and my hosts did not close the door. Apparently, it is disturbing to be in there too long.
That got me thinking: what if you had the opposite? What if there was a room in which you heard everything; every sound, every signal. And if you could then eliminate the things you know about and understand, the noise that fills our senses, what would you be left with? In that moment was born the Echo Chamber, the piece of tech that sits at the heart of Silent Running.
Hear everything, silence what you control, listen to the secrets of creation.
The Setting
I had the universe of the Lethe Cluster already formed. It appeared in story form with that title in a competition entry to the annual NYCMM short story competition for 2012 and go me through the first round of the competition with confidence-boosting feedback. You can read that story in “Image and Other Stories“. I’ve also noodled around that universe on this blog, under the broad heading of Cluster Wars.
The potential of tech that hears everything, and a region of space that defies intrusion combined to give me Silent Running. The characters and the broad arc of the story came together relatively quickly after that. Early versions of the eventual novella were rejected and hindsight says rightly so. I took it through my beloved beta readers and the text came back covered in suggestions and corrections. I cannot thank them enough. Hours of their precious time were spent sharpening my prose, tightening the story and holding up a mirror to where I had been lazy or just plain wrong.
The Process
That process, painful as it was, got me most of the way to this version. It still needed tinkering and getting to the point where I was happy with it, but there was something that still felt incomplete. It took dinner with one of my writing group to set the seal on this story. He was visiting the UK and we managed to find a few hours one evening to devote to good food and an absurd range of topics. Corporate governance, religion, astrophysics, quantum physics, and more. It gave me a combination of context and confidence. There was a way to bring the science in the story together with what I was developing in the broader Lethe Cluster universe, the way I wanted space travel to work and how this linked to faith, commerce and politics.
The Result
Shadows of all of that are in Silent Running. Faith and science feature heavily. There are three strong female characters at the heart of the story, each bringing something potent to the plot. Silent Running stands on its own (it may spawn a sequel) and it will now fit seamlessly into the universe I have imagined. That will take a five-volume space opera to explore fully. I hope you enjoy this taster of the stories to come.
My thanks to my crew, they know who they are and how their efforts got me here, nine years after the idea first popped. Thanks also to Mike at Lost Colony Magazine for the gentle editing and publication that has brought this story to the world. Head over there to read the preview and pick up a copy. Nine years have gone into a 90 minute read. I hope you think it is worth it.
Bubbling with excitement, at my age you’d think I’d know better.
My second novella “Silent Running” will be coming out July 25th. This one is hard sci-fi, built around three strong female characters and their interweaving intentions. Head over to Lost Colony Magazine to read the preview and pre-order your copy.
It is set in my Cluster Wars universe which some of you will know from my short story “The Lethe Cluster” and bits and bobs around this blog. More on this to come…
Write what you know. And what do you know better than your own stories? (We’ll park the question of my notoriously poor memory.)
Published today at Piker Press, “Calculus, Charlotte and the Breaking of Waves” is at its heart a true story. Except the bits that have been inserted because I just can’t recall across the span of thirty years. And except for the barest little flush of magic. In fact, it is hardly magic at all, merely interpreting two things that were coincident, possibly correlated, into being causally related. Isn’t that what magic is? Reasons overriding reason.
For what its worth, this much is unequivocally true: I did visit family on Grand Cayman at the age of 16, their condo was right by the beach where the water was dominated by the wreck of the Gamma, and there was a gazebo where I would attempt to study. It was also the winter in which I finally cracked Calculus. As for the rest, you decide where to suspend your disbelief.
It’s not the first time I have used the formula: true recollection, judicious addition where age and uncertainty have left a fog, and a pinch of fairy dust. The first story I sold, and which has recently been reprinted is a case in point. The good people at (the now closed) Mad Scientist Journal first bought “An Absolute Amount of Sadness” in 2016 and Flame Tree found something resonant in it this year.
Varying the quantities affects the outcome. Perhaps my favourite of my published stories is “The Book of Condolence”, a collage of unrelated truths stitched together with pure invention. Dark House books picked up that one for “What We Talk About When We Talk About It”.
And now I think of it there is some central truth, some seed of reality in every story I have written, no matter how fantastical. The Girl Who Gives Me Sunsets (my favourite title of one of my stories) is a nickname for a dear friend, who coincidentally provided the Spice Girls facts that are the musical motif of the story.
It leaves me wondering if it is possible to completely absent yourself from what you create.
While you ponder the answer, Calculus, Charlotte and the Breaking of Waves is this week’s featured story over at Piker Press and will be available at this link thereafter. Or follow the trail of links above to find other anthologies with my stories.
This one has been available in Kindle format for a while but it took a bit longer to get the paperback ready.
I’m hoping it is an oddity you will enjoy. The brief from Phoebe, the publisher, was a creature-themed fairy tale punking. With me so far? Well, I decided to take things a bit further by making mine a mash-up of two traditional Sumatran tales.
The source material was from this wonderful book:
My original idea was to atompunk The Magic Crocodile and I might still write that one day. But the concept was not really coming together so I moved on to the story of An Honest Man – a good solid core to build on but it lacked an emotional punch. The Green Princess had that in abundance. From there, well you’ll have to read it to find out.
Let me know if you’ve ever read another punked Indonesian folk tale, I’m hoping mine is the first but definitely not the last.
Looking ahead, the lovely people at Flame Tree have agreed to reprint my story An Absolute Amount of Sadness in their immigrant sci-fi anthology. You can check out the author list on their blog. Regulars may recognise the title, it first appeared in Fitting In by Mad Scientist Journal (sadly no longer with us). They also published “The Girl Who Gives Me Sunsets” in Utter Fabrication, which remains my favourite title from one of my stories. Look out for that and a new novella in 2023
I haven’t shared one of my own stories here for a while. In the light of what is going on in Afghanistan at the moment, and our fears for the rights of women and minorities, I thought I’d share something set in Kabul. It is a bit of action / adventure I wrote for a competition and it tries to look beyond the tropes of terror and insurgency to a more hopeful future. That hope is in pretty short supply right now.
The story got me into the next round of the competition. I hope you enjoy it.
The Healer of Kabul
Hana took a deep breath and steadied her nerves. From across the room Ester gave her a thumbs up.
“This is my signature piece,” Hana said, lifting a creamy bowl decorated with vivid poppies in bloom. She remembered the instruction to smile. “Anti-tank mines have a porcelain liner to make them harder to detect.” She put the bowl down and lifted another, dull beige with a hole in the base to show the original state. “Each liner is hand-painted, with a resin insert to make it watertight.” She gestured to the side. Ester panned the tiny GoPro around to show the display. “You can use them as planters, or for decoration, maybe to serve your favorite sweets. My country has seen so much violence. The reminders of it are everywhere. I hope to take these objects and show my people we can grow beyond war to lives of peace and beauty.”
Ester tapped the GoPro to stop recording. Hana took the opportunity to shrug off her abaya. It was stifling in the tiny shop.
“Perfect,” Ester said, “I’ll splice it together with our other segments. We’ll have your first promotional video ready in no time.” She clipped the little camera around her neck and glanced at her phone. “This is going to be a real success Hana, I can feel it.”
“A success for us both, Ester. We should be partners.”
Ester laughed and reached out to touch Hana’s cheek. “That’s not allowed, my dear. Anyway, no one works for a charity to get rich.”
The door to the tiny room opened, letting the clamor of Kabul’s traffic flood into the room. Ashar popped his head in.
“Finished?” he asked. Hana nodded, trying not to smile as she watched her brother’s eyes swing to Ester, softening in adoration. He was smitten by the tall German woman, even though she was technically old enough to be their mother.
Without shifting his gaze he waved a satchel by its strap. The flap was thrown open. The shop lights glinted off the grenades stuffed inside. “Delivery,” he said. Ashar didn’t have many words in any language, but he was smart enough to use them effectively.
Ester’s eyebrows shot up. “Are those…?”
“Hand grenades,” Hana said. She snapped her fingers to get Ashar’s attention and gestured for him to keep hold of them. He swung back into his seat under the awning in front of the shop.
“Are they safe?”
“This is Kabul,” Hana said, a little surprised that Ester was rattled. The flare of her nostrils gave Hana away, Ester shook her head and laughed. The German worked for a non-profit organization that promoted local artists in some of the world’s most troubled countries. She had an office in the highly protected Green Zone, and while she had arrived in a rickshaw, her armed guards had followed in a dented Pajero and now watched from the tea shop across the road.
Ashar’s shout from outside stalled the conversation. Hana bumped her hip hard on a table corner as she hurried to see, Ester hot on her heels.
A skinny man with a scraggly beard pulled at the strap of the satchel. Ashar tried to keep hold of it. With a yank the thief snatched the satchel, still loaded with its contents, from the boy’s grasp and leapt away onto the back of a waiting motorbike.
“Hey!” Ester yelled. She grabbed Hana’s arm and ran out into the street. A rickshaw idled by the side of the road, the driver squatting beside it, dragging on a cigarette and watching with disinterest. Ester leapt in. Without thinking Hana got in beside her.
“Follow them!”
The driver shrugged and looked away.
Cursing in German, Ester hopped into the driver’s seat thumbing on the GoPro. She stabbed the throttle and the rickshaw lurched away. Hana yelped as she over-balanced, shoulders slamming into the rickshaw’s metal frame. For a few paces the barking driver kept up with them. He reached in and grabbed a handful of Ester’s light headscarf. It fluttered away as they sped off down the little side street.
The motorbike was an aged, sputtering Honda. It hadn’t got far ahead. Ester twisted the handlebars to swing the rickshaw into the stuttering traffic on the main street. Horns blared as the rickshaw tipped on two of its three wheels. Hana threw herself the other way to counterbalance it.
“Hundesohn!” Ester swore at the slow-moving traffic and hawkers with wheeled carts. She pumped her palm on the horn.
A gout of diesel smoke from a brightly-colored bus hid the motorbike for a moment. The air cleared. Two men pushing a heavy wooden cart laden with cages blocked the road, stalling the motorbike. The thief and his getaway driver twisted and backed up.
“Hold on,” Ester called over her shoulder.
They careened towards the motorbike. A crash was inevitable. The world slowed. Hana looked into the dark eyes of the thief. Cold, calculating. There was a menace there. Was it a crime of opportunity, or were they targeting her? A woman running her own business in this fiercely patriarchal country. A woman bringing a message of peace with the relics from fifty years of near-constant war.
In those agonizingly slow seconds, she realized this wasn’t about theft, it was about her.
The motorbike leapt away. Ester slammed on the brakes, hurling Hana forward. Hana’s face planted between Ester’s shoulder blades. Ahead of them chickens pecked and shuffled in their cages, entirely unconcerned.
“Sheisse.” Ester hauled on the handlebars, manoeuvring around the cart and back into the chase. The road cleared for a few meters. The thief looked back from his pillion seat, held out the satchel and dropped it in the road.
“Stop.” Hana grabbed Ester’s shoulder and jumped from the slowing rickshaw. Her sandal twisted away from her foot. She hopped, jumped and landed on the satchel, smothering it with her body. She counted the seconds, dimly aware of horns blaring, shouts. From somewhere a long way away – Ester’s voice.
The grenades were all meant to be safe. Dismantled, fuses and explosive material removed, then reassembled. But the thief had known her and had dropped the satchel for her to pick up. He could have added a real grenade. She couldn’t allow innocent bystanders to be harmed for a vendetta against her.
Three breaths. Four. Plus the time it took to get to the satchel. If it was an old grenade the chemical fuse could have degraded. Five, six.
“It’s OK. I think we’re safe.” Ester’s shadow fell on Hana. It was brave of her, Hana thought, to come so close. She gripped Ester’s outstretched hand and got to her feet. Hana’s hijab was awry and a crowd of onlookers had gathered, unaware of the potential for mortal peril. She glanced around. They were more interested in the tall blonde woman in jeans and boots who had been driving a rickshaw. There was a beep as Ester switched off the GoPro that still hung around her neck.
Hana slung the satchel over her shoulder. “We’d better take that rickshaw back.”
Business boomed for a while. The promotional material Ester filmed in the shop may have won Hana some international sales, but it was the jerky video of an expletive-laden chase through the streets in a rickshaw that won Hana brief renown. The “Healer of Kabul” – a slightly built, modestly dressed, hijab-wearing young woman became a social media star. Those dignitaries that ventured outside the Green Zone looking for a photo opportunity or a souvenir from the real Afghanistan asked for her by name. Hana smiled and sold them her hand grenade candles and bullet kohl bottles.
Hana’s fame was waning by the time Ester managed to arrange an exhibition of Hana’s painted porcelain in Berlin. “It seems a terrible risk,” Hana said, as they sipped tea in her small apartment. “You can’t seriously mean to buy all those pieces yourself.”
“The gallery is threatening to pull out and the sponsors are losing interest.” Ester shook her head. “There’s a Rohingya kid in Burma who makes kites that everyone’s gushing over now. That’s just the way of the world. But I believe in what you are doing here, Hana. I want the world to see it properly. I’ll buy the inventory and underwrite the exhibition. Are the crates ready to go?”
“Ashar has been packing everything carefully.” She smiled across at her brother. He’d grown more accustomed to Ester but was still clearly besotted.
For a moment Ester stared into her tea. Lipstick marred the edge of the glass. “I have an appointment with the customs people,” she said. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“Ashar, see Ester to her car please, then buy us some bread for dinner.”
Hana tidied while she waited for his return, humming to herself. The fading of her fame did not bother her the way it seemed to bother Ester. Her items still sold enough to make a decent living and Hana felt happy to be independent, able to support herself and look after her brother. For a long time that had been a distant dream. In a way her independence was a greater symbol of Afghanistan’s healing than the art she made.
Ashar was late getting back. He’d probably stopped to watch the local boys play soccer. By the time he wandered home the bread would be stiff and cold. With a sigh Hana readied herself to go and find him, tying on her hijab with practiced efficiency and shrugging into her loose abaya, and checking the deep pockets for all her necessities. She opened the front door and stopped. Ashar stood in the doorway, his pose still and unnatural. There was a sharp stink. He’d wet himself. Tears stood in his eyes
“Ashar!” she started, angry and upset. He hadn’t done this for years. Then she saw the muzzle of the gun pointed at his ribs.
“Take the boy inside, tie him up and leave him. Someone will find him eventually. It’s the woman we want.” The gunman spoke in heavy, hill tribe Pashtu. She knew those eyes. The grenade thief. Fear rooted her to the spot as a bag went over her head and rough hands tied her wrists together. She stifled her scream into a sob. They had her brother.
Hana gasped as her shins caught on something hard. Someone pushed her into a van. They didn’t travel far, she guessed no more than fifteen minutes of bumping on the uneven roads and stuttering through traffic.
The bag came off in a large spartan room. There were two men. The thief and his getaway driver. Hana’s mind whirled. Why them? Why now?
The room was well lit. Her blood went cold. One wall was adorned with an ISIS flag. She turned around. On a heavy wooden table a GoPro pointed at the flag. The thief untied her hands and gave her a shove.
“On your knees.”
She slumped down. Tears dripped on the black cloth of the abaya. The thief wound a cover over his face, leaving only those cold eyes showing. He ranted a speech to the camera. Hana vaguely registered something about the erosion of values, the disease of liberalism. She couldn’t focus, she knew what was coming. Everyone knew someone who had been lost to war or insurgency. Not third or fourth hand but direct relations, close friends.
She’d made herself a target, the symbol of a different life, the different country Afghanistan could be. She could accept her fate, but who would look after Ashar?
She blinked away tears and stared into the camera. The camera. She knew that GoPro. She’d rehearsed in front of it, the scratches on the casing were etched into her memory.
“Ester,” she said, her voice hoarse.
The ranting thief stopped.
“Ester,” she said again. Clearly this time. Her voice pitched to carry. A shadow crossed the doorway.
“We’ll have to edit that out of course.” Ester stepped into the room. She nodded to the thief who took a couple of steps away from Hana towards the door and stopped, his hand resting on his gun.
“Is this some kind of game? A publicity stunt for the exhibition?” Hana asked, her voice rising as panic gave way to incredulity. She started to get to her feet but the jerk of the muzzle sat her back down again.
“Publicity, yes. But not a game.”
“You can’t be serious. Who are these men? Are they actors?”
Ester dropped to her haunches, eyes almost level with Hana. “Deadly serious, my dear. We had a good run, you and I. But I’m cashing out now. Can you see the headlines? The Healer of Kabul, a martyr for peace. If it’s any consolation your exhibition is guaranteed to be a success.”
“You said no one ever joined a charity to get rich.”
“I won’t be. Just comfortable, without worry.” Ester reached out to touch Hana’s cheek. “I’d need several more like you to be rich.”
Hana jerked away, slipping her hands into her abaya as she did so.
“Kill her,” Ester said to the thief, stepping back.
“Wait.” Hana pulled her hands out of the abaya. In her right hand she held a grenade. In her left, she held the pin. Ester laughed. “Really? I know all about your grenades.”
“Do you? I want to heal my country Ester. I may dream of a better, peaceful Kabul. But I live in the real one. Do you really think I go about without protection?” The thief was backing away, the driver had his back to the wall and was sidling to the door. “Your henchmen don’t seem too confident.” Hana taunted, rising slowly.
“It’s a bluff. Kill her.”
Hana gave the thief a chill smile and tossed the grenade towards the door. One breath. There was a plink as the lever released and fell away, a pop as the fuse lit. The grenade skittered across the floor stopping just outside the door. Two breaths. Hana was already diving for the table, tipping it as she fell, the GoPro sliding off beside her. Three breaths. Hana’s shoulder hit the floor as she curled and covered her ears. She heard heavy footsteps pounding.
“Scheisse.”
The explosion rocked the room, ripping plaster from the walls and ceiling, filling the air with dust. The house groaned, a crash reverberated over the echoes of the blast. A billow of new dust wafted over the edge of the table.
She crawled out into a monochrome world of plaster dust. Ester’s booted foot poked out of the rubble, motionless. A messy pile of spattered blood and shredded cloth was all that was left of the thief. Hana stumbled out of the room. The explosion had torn through the wall of the hallway leaving a gaping hole to the courtyard below.
The driver had made it some way down the hall. The blast had taken him in the back. His handgun lay a little distance away. She picked it up and slipped it into the pocket of her abaya, opposite from Ester’s GoPro.
Kabul was not yet the city she dreamed it could be, and it would take her a while to walk home to her brother.
This year I had the good fortune to take part in the Lockdown Film Festival – 45 films of isolation inspired monologues. Each in our own bubble, writers wrote, actors performed to their smartphones, and the producer Suki Singh put it all together.
You can head over to the festival home page to browse through all the successful contributions, and there are some crackers, or just jump straight to mine – Rats, performed by the excellent Dani Claydon.
Each one only lasts a minute or two. Go have a listen, come back and tell me what you think.
Ambrien is a warrior serving the God-Queen. With her city besieged by a relentless foe, Ambrien’s unique abilities take her away from the battle to challenge everything she believes in order to bring an end to the war.
You can read, and I hope enjoy, Return of the Queen as a simple fantasy story on Crimson Streets – head over there to take a look.
Of course, there is a bit more to it. If you’re interested…
Getting it right
I wrote the first draft of Return of the Queen in a bit of a rush around March 2018. The deadline for a submission call loomed and I had left things a little late. One form rejection and one personal rejection (“it’s a bit slow to develop”) later and I decided to let my beloved beta locusts loose on it. I don’t do that with all my stories; their time is precious but this one seemed worth the candle.
It came back littered with comments. Structure, pacing and grammar were all thoroughly examined and thoughtful suggestions given on what to improve, what to cut, what to keep. We had a debate about whether the sacred knives in the story (kindjal, from khanjar) should be an invariant noun, I decided the plural should be kindjali to help the reader while accepting the technical point on invariance. And then the fighting details – style, weaponry, armour – getting these physically plausible and to a point of consistency with the setting.
My beta locusts are awesome. They did all that for the pleasure of doing it and I love them. Of course, I’m still seeing things in this story that I am itching to edit.
The next rejection showed the benefits of all that hard work: “terrific epic fantasy feel, with terrific magic and worldbuilding” just not quite right for that anthology.
Finding the right home
It gathered dust for almost a year, I tinkered every now and then, but the right opportunity didn’t come up, until I came across Crimson Streets. You can see the outcome of that and the interpretation of the brilliant artist Chlo’e Camonayan on their site.
The bigger themes
For me, Return of the Queen is more than a bit of fantasy escapism (nothing wrong with that!). We were deep into #metoo in 2018, I was curious to know if I had a legitimate voice to add, and what my contribution might be. That culminated in “Me and Me Too. Even You” late in the year. Return of the Queen precedes the poem but is part of the same thought process. The setting is a matriarchal society, a female deity, and no backhanded Steve Trevor’s to save the day. In this case I had two questions: is it power or masculinity that corrupts? and is there a path to redemption?
Guilt, forgiveness and redemption are themes I orbit around, and occasionally crash into, so this will come as no surprise to regular readers.
Now you know what I was trying to do go and add a comment on Crimson Streets and let me know if I got close to it (or here, talk to me people). If that dimension of the story doesn’t float your boat, I hope you appreciate the design of the battle skirt, the use of short spears instead of swords, the work that went into the detail, and Chlo’e’s awesome picture.
Hilt detail from the “Splendours of the Subcontinent” exhibition at the Queen’s Gallery in Aug 2018
Ali Abbas 