Rough Draft Fridays

Hash, the third POV from Mourning, is a character you may remember from The Dew of Flesh. He had a relatively minor role (I won't go into the details, to avoid potential spoilers). We learn a lot more about Hash in this book--where he's from, what brought him to the Pits, and how he became a priest in a shrine of life. He faces some of the same troubles as Saat and Abass, but from different angles. The economic hardships of Khi'ilan exert a different kind of pressure on Hash, and he finds himself in a very difficult situation in the shrine. Of course, there are also plenty of people who are willing to make Hash's life more difficult than it has to be--as you're about to see.


A block from the shrine, Hash saw them. A group of men—four of them. In the mild weather, they had abandoned the sheepskin cloaks that most in the city wore. No cloaks meant that Hash could make out the cheap linen and wool of their clothing. It also meant that he could see that they carried clubs and, more importantly, that they looked like men who knew how to use them.

He eyed them for a pace or two before he realized they were waiting. Not right in front of the shrine. That might be obvious. But after a few more paces, he realized they were watching the front door of the shrine. Watching and waiting. That was not a good sign.

At the next building, a run-down tavern that served watered-down beer, Hash stopped and leaned up against the peeling whitewash. Watching and waiting. It could be they were the guard of some merchant who had decided to visit the shrine. Could be. But they weren’t. The way the rest of the people on the street avoided looking at them told Hash these men were trouble. And the street, normally fairly busy, was all but empty in the late morning. Why? The answer was obvious: people knew trouble. And with the eses gone, trouble meant keep your head down and your eyes up.

Novel Wednesdays

Another passage from All Clear.

She had always wondered how the contemps had found the courage to go on after their husbands, parents, children, and friends had been pulled lifeless from the rubble. But it wasn't courage. It was that there were so many things that had to be taken care of that by the time one had done all of them, it was too late to give way.

Poetry Mondays

Here is the fourth stanza of Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind." I've skipped two stanzas, not because I don't like them (I do) but because I don't think they're my favorite, and there are other things I'd like to talk about. This stanza is heartbreaking to me. I fully recognize that an emotional, subjective response isn't always the best or most important response to an aesthetic object, but I think those types of response are valuable nonetheless.

The two stanzas I skipped are about clouds and waves, so that the first lines of this stanza recall the three first stanzas: leaves, clouds, waves directed by the power of the wind. The phrase "to pant beneath thy power" is a remarkable one, I think. In the appeal to a former, lost childhood, you can hear a familiar trope from Romanticism, namely, an idealization of childhood, its innocence and magic.

But I think there's nothing more remarkable in this poem than Shelley's lines, "Oh lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud! / I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!"



If I were a dead leaf thou mightest bear;
If I were a swift cloud to fly with thee;
A wave to pant beneath thy power, and share

The impulse of thy strength, only less free
Than thou, O uncontrollable! If even
I were as in my boyhood, and could be

The comrade of thy wanderings over Heaven,
As then, when to outstrip thy skiey speed
Scarce seemed a vision; I would ne'er have striven

As thus with thee in prayer in my sore need.
Oh, lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud!
I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!

A heavy weight of hours has chained and bowed
One too like thee: tameless, and swift, and proud.

Rough Draft Fridays

Here's a bit more from Saat's POV. Among other things, Saat is facing many of the same problems as Abass: the hunger gripping the city, the sudden changes to power, and a sense of responsibility for people that, he believes, he has let down. Saat, of course, has his own problems to deal with too--which you'll learn all about when the book comes out--but one of the foremost ones is that, as a former esis, he's unsure of his place in the new Khi'ilan. Part of his story is learning what that new place might be, particularly in a new Old Truth that he needs to adjust to.


Furtherfew, Old Truth’s largest market, was bustling. Saat pulled his sheepskin cloak closer against the wind, grimaced at the frozen slush that was turning his feet to ice, and sidestepped a team of man rolling barrels out of the market.

Tair and Father, what he wouldn’t give for a decent pair of boots.

A man of the law, and especially an esis who had been on the streets of Old Truth, never looked at a market the same way as other men. Oh, Saat saw the small stalls, most lacking any sort of covering, the wood warped from rain and snow and sun. And he saw the sad piles of creeping squash and pumpkin and onions that were, from the smell, on the edge of being foul beyond eating.

More than that, though, he saw the boys—some almost grown enough to be men—who wandered back and forth through the crowd, ready to cut a purse or palm a piece of fruit when eyes were turned. The bigger boys weren’t so bad; Saat had never felt of twinge of conscious if he threw them in a cell for a few days or just gave them a good roughing up. The small ones, though—towheaded and smiling—they would cut a purse or palm a coin as fast as the bigger ones, but as soon as they turned their tearful eyes on Saat, he suddenly found it hard to finish the whipping, or take them all the way to the cells. He would tell himself, time and again, that they just needed a talking to, a good mother, and a belly full of food. And over time, the small thieves became the big ones.

Novel Wednesdays

I just finished reading Connie Willis's wonderful All Clear and I thought I'd give you a few of my favorite parts.

This is a humorous exchange between two characters (one major, one minor) that I really enjoyed. The man is trying to seduce the woman.

"I'm deadly serious," he said. "Our souls have been destined to be together throughout history. I told you, we were Tristan and Isolde." He moved in closer. "We were Pelleas and Melisande, Heloise and Abelard." He leaned toward her. "Catherine and Heathcliff--"

"Catherine and Heathcliff are not historical figures, and there weren't any Christian slaves in Babylon," she said, slipping neatly away from him. "It was B.C., not A.D."

Poetry Mondays

Here's the first stanza of a poem by Percy Bysshe Shelley, "Ode to the West Wind." I love it for a number of reasons. First of all, I think it has beautiful language. There are a lot of ways for a poem to be beautiful, of course. Here, Shelley does an excellent job with imagery. Pestilential leaves, driven by the wind into their graves, is a remarkable image. I love the confidence of the poem, the assurance that Shelley brings to it. When he reaches the last line of the stanza, there is something remarkable to me about those words: "hear, oh, hear!"

Oddly, though, I find myself disenchanted (pun?) with the image of the leaves as ghosts. It's the only line of the stanza that I don't like.



O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn's being,
Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead
Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing,

Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red,
Pestilence-stricken multitudes: O thou,
Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed

The wingéd seeds, where they lie cold and low,
Each like a corpse within its grave, until
Thine azure sister of the Spring shall blow

Her clarion o'er the dreaming earth, and fill
(Driving sweet buds like flocks to feed in air)
With living hues and odours plain and hill:

Wild Spirit, which art moving everywhere;
Destroyer and preserver; hear, oh, hear!

Rough Draft Fridays

Here's a bit more from Abass's POV from Mourning. From the pieces I've shown you, you can get a sense of the problems that Khi'ilan is facing at the end of their first winter: hunger, desperation, and the instability that comes from a sudden shift in power. These are problems that Abass is involved in not only because he is the godblood of Khi'ilan, but because he feels responsible for them. As the eses warned in The Dew of Flesh, winter came when the tair died, and Abass was the one to kill the tair.



The temple was, of course, officially no longer a temple. It was hard to have a temple when your god was dead. It was even harder to have a temple when all of the warrior-priests had gone off and gotten themselves killed.

Perhaps the biggest obstacle that faced the council, though, was that it was, in the end, still the temple.

Abass grimaced, half in relief, half in despair, as the gates to the temple compound swung shut behind the last wagon. Bringing the grain here hadn’t been the original plan, although the temple compound was certainly big enough, and there were places to store the grain. But it had been necessity, rather than logistics, that had forced Mece to turn west along the Way of Ash, bringing them straight to the temple rather than to the city’s granaries.

Mobs—even the desperately hopeful kind, like the one outside—had that kind of power.