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Reading Sundays: THE NON-AFFAIR (Part 7) a short story by Cynthia Sally Haggard

“Ifyoutakemetoyourfavoritecafe,” I remarked to the desk, “I’llorderthemostexpensivethingthere.”

His silence was deadening.

Unable to hold back any more, I lifted my face to his as a flood of giggles washed over me.

He studied me for a moment, a dull redness creeping along his cheeks. His laugh, when it came, was a series of short, sharp barks.

On the other side of that desk, out of sight, I clenched my fingers together until the bones cracked. On my lap sat my law-school application. What had I done?

***

I argued with myself for a couple of weeks, before manhandling myself back to his office to see about the law school application I’d placed oh-so-carefully into his mailbox the week before, just out of sight of his pregnant secretary, who glowered at me. The door was half-open, but he was not there. I stood still for many moments, inhaling the silence, before I crept to the other side of his sullen desk, and sank slowly, oh-so-slowly into his seat. I exhaled as I leaned back in his high-backed chair,

running the tips of my fingers over the fake veneer of the desk, closing my eyes as if by doing so I could imbue myself with his power. The back and the arms of the chair cradled me, as if he were holding me in his arms. As I relaxed, the muscles in my back thawed, my body hummed, purring. If only we could be closer—A light step made me start up.

He leaned against the door jamb watching, a smile on his face, a predatory smile. My body snapped back into its usual jammedness as my cheeks heated up. I rose and attempted to come around the desk, but a sharp corner dug into my hip, causing me to cry out in pain. Blindly I clutched at the fake veneer, but my hands slid away. I set my jaw and somehow heaved my way around the short side of the desk that wasn’t against the wall. Finally, I was by those two prim plastic chairs, on my usual side of the desk, on my way out. But he was there, blocking the doorway.

“That was quite something.” He grinned.

I searched his face, looking for—a morsel of kindness?

“Want my job?” [To be continued.]

Jessica Day George’s PRINCESS OF THE MIDNIGHT BALL

I loved this retelling of the TWELVE DANCING PRINCESSES. Jessica Day George adds some features that fill in the spaces and add logical sense to the gaps in the tale. We learn why there are twelve princesses, and why the Underworld King’s twelve sons dance with them each night. We learn much more detail about the exact nature of the curse and how to foil it. And we learn who the old woman (who helps the soldier at the beginning of the tale) might be.

It is hard to write a novel with so many characters, and I thought Ms. George did a good job of bringing out the different personalities of each princess in a convincing way. There were many charming details, such as when Pansy, one of the youngest, believes she is talking to a good spirit, who is in reality the young man who is saving the princesses, hidden behind an invisibility cloak. Five stars.

PRIESTESS OF AVALON (AVALON #4) by Marion Zimmer Bradley & Diana L. Paxson

While THE MISTS OF AVALON, the first volume in this series was set in Britain in the five hundreds CE, when the Romans left, the Anglo-Saxons arrived and Christianity was ascendant, PRIESTESS OF AVALON is set some three hundred years earlier, between the years 249 and 329 CE so we experience Avalon and its Priestesses in their heyday.

PRIESTESS OF AVALON is the tale of Julia Coelia Helena, daughter of Julius Coelius, a Roman nobleman, and Rian, a Pagan woman associated with the priestesses of Avalon. Rian calls her daughter Eilan. And so we have the tale of the Empress Helena, mother of Constantine the Great, renowned for her Christian faith, and her influence over her son which caused him to make the whole Roman Empire Christian. But in this telling, her faith is more complex and never far away from the Pagan roots of the Goddess.

If you love reading well-known tales told from the unusual perspective of the women involved, you will enjoy this story. Five stars.

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LADY OF AVALON (AVALON #3) by Marion Zimmer Bradley & Diana L. Paxson

This novel is three stories in one, and serves to bridge the time period between FOREST HOUSE which takes place from 86 to 96 CE, to 452 CE when Viviane takes over as Lady of Avalon at the age of 26.

Part One (THE WISEWOMAN) takes place from 96 to 118 CE. It is the story of what happens to Caillean and Gawen after the destruction of the Forest House when Eilen and her lover Gaius/Gawen are sacrificed. Caillean, a senior priestess from the Forest House has founded a daughter cell at Avalon (near Glastonbury Tor) and flees there with 10-year-old Gawen, the son of Eilen and Gaius/Gawen at the beginning of this story. Gawen is trained as a Druid, but like many such characters in this saga he feels torn between his mother’s British heritage and his father’s Roman heritage. Things are complicated when he becomes friends with kindly Father Joseph (Joseph of Arimathea) and becomes drawn to the teachings of Christianity. When Father Joseph dies, he decides to leave Avalon and seek his Roman grandfather.

For some reason, the Faerie Queen (the wisewoman) has decided to entrust her daughter Sianna to the priestesses of Avalon, and she is groomed to be High Priestess. Naturally, when Gawen returns to Avalon from his stint in the Roman army, they fall in love. Gawen is initiated into the Druids and becomes the Pendragon, the Head of the Dragon. At the Beltane fires, Gawen and Sianna become Lord and Lady, but the celebrations are interrupted by the monks from the nearby priory desecrating the stone circle on the Tor. Gawen dies trying to defend the sacred stones, leaving Sianna pregnant. And High Priestess Caillean calls down the mists to protect Avalon from the outside world.

Part Two (THE HIGH PRIESTESS) takes place from 285 to 293 CE. Dierna, who can trace her descent through seven generations to Sianna, is now High Priestess of Avalon. At the beginning of this story, Dierna is visiting Eidden Mynoc, the Prince of the Durotriges (a tribe that inhabited the area that is now Dorset in south-western England) in order to take his daughter, 18-year-old Teleri, as a novice priestess to Avalon.  On their way to Avalon, their party is ambushed by a group of Anglo-Saxons and Teleri would have been raped, were it not for Dierna’s magic.

Time passes, and Teleri is chosen to escort Dierna to Venta Belgarum (Winchester) because her father has decided that she should leave Avalon and marry Marcus Aurelius Musaeus Carausius, the Admiral of the Britannic fleet (which patrols the coast of southern Britain to fend off hordes of Saxons who are trying to cross the water to settle in Britain.) Teleri, of course, is given no choice in the matter, and Dierna is reluctant to see her go, and only does so because she has a vision that this will come to pass.

Naturally, Teleri never comes to love her husband (who eventually becomes Emperor of Britannia.) Instead, she falls in love with a young Roman officer in his train, Allectus. When Allectus rises up against the rule of Carausius, both men die, and Teleri flees to Avalon, where she is welcomed as the next Lady of Avalon.

Part Three (DAUGHTER OF AVALON) takes place from 440 to 452 CE, at a time when the Romans are abandoning Britain to the Saxon hordes. This story deals with the girlhood of Viviane, her prickly relationship with her mother Ana (the Lady of Avalon,) her training as a priestess of Avalon, and her initiation as High Priestess at the age of 26 on the death of her mother.

It is interesting that authors Marion Zimmer Bradley and Diane L. Paxson decided to wedge three stories into one book, instead of making a trilogy out of them. However, the book doesn’t seem to suffer from this, and this volume provides a most interesting prequel to THE MISTS OF AVALON. Five stars.

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Reading Sundays: THE NON-AFFAIR (Part 6) a short story by Cynthia Sally Haggard

I was a young lady, and wanted to be treated as such, so I wore my church clothes, a black skirt that came to mid-calf and made me look older, the white blouse with the stiff collar Mother had given me as a gift, and my favorite dark-blue sweater I’d knitted myself. I hoped it brought out the color of my eyes.

“I—I—Iwanttoaskyousomething..” I drew in a monumental breath that made me cough. “Iwanttoapplytolawschool,” I leaned to the right to slide the application form out of my briefcase.

“Oh, sure,” he drawled. “Bring it along next week.”

I straightened in my seat, folding my hands softly so that he wouldn’t see that I already had the form.

“You’re going to graduate soon,” he observed. “Perhaps, after that, you’ll allow me to take you to my favorite cafe?”

My gaze fell into my black lap. I couldn’t look at him. How I longed to say ‘yes’ to his invitation, but the heft of his expectations was too painful. I was only a girl, he was my professor; he was a sophisticated man of the world, I was a fish out of water. The thirteen miles from his office to my home seemed aeons away.

The silence uncoiled, lengthening. Unable to bear it any more, I placed both hands flat on his huge desk, and drew in a deep breath.

“Ifyoutakemetoyourfavoritecafe,” I remarked to the desk, “I’llorderthemostexpensivethingthere.”

His silence was deadening.

Unable to hold back any more, I lifted my face to his as a flood of giggles washed over me.

He studied me for a moment, a dull redness creeping along his cheeks. His laugh, when it came, was a series of short, sharp barks. [To be continued.]

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THE FOREST HOUSE (AVALON #2) by Marion Zimmer Bradley & Diana L. Paxson

It is around 86 CE. Eilan, a 14-year-old grand-daughter of Ardanos, the Arch-Druid of Britannia, can already see visions and hears the call of the Goddess. All might have gone smoothly with her initiation into the Priestesses of the Forest House, had the Chief Priestess Lhiannon not mistakenly thrown her cloak over her close friend Dieda, thus claiming Dieda as a priestess for the Forest House, instead of Eilan.

Dieda is the youngest daughter of Eilan’s grandfather Ardanos, but she is a similar age to Eilan (perhaps 15 or 16) and looks uncannily like her. Thus the two girls are often confused, one with another, causing a critical plot-twist to this novel.  But Dieda doesn’t have visions, nor does she seem particularly drawn to the Forest House. Instead she considers herself to be betrothed to a young man named Cynric. It is thus a tragedy for her when Lhiannon inadvertently claims her for the priestesshood, rather than Eilan

It is near the fires of Beltane (30 April in our calendar) when this community discovers a boy injured in a boar pit. They take him in and heal his injuries, most not realizing that he is in fact Roman (except for Ardanos.)  But he is of mixed blood. His mother was British and called him Gawen. His father is Gaius Macellius Severus, a Roman Army Officer. His Roman name is Gaius Macellius Severus Siluricus, to honor the fact that his mother came from the tribe of the Silures.

Unfortunately, Gaius and Eilan fall in love and their love and the dire consequences of their coming together to fashion a son, named Gawen after his father, leads to the magnificent and tragic climax of this novel.

Although this novel appears to have nothing to do with THE MISTS OF AVALON, it is well worth reading, if only to get some wonderful descriptions of the rites and customs of the Druids, before they lost their power. Five Stars.

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Marion Zimmer Bradley’s THE MISTS OF AVALON (AVALON #1)

[image error]To many, three is a sacred number. It is the sign of the Trinity. Three Norns twine the threads of Fate. And in this re-telling of the King Arthur Legend (told from the women’s point of view) we have three sisters. The eldest, Viviane, is the Priestess of Avalon, the Holy Island of Apples dedicated to the Goddess. Igraine, is the High Queen, mother of Morgaine and Arthur. Then there is Morgause, the jealous youngest sister.

However, it is Morgaine who is the protagonist,  Morgaine, who becomes the last Priestess of Avalon, who witnesses the destruction of Camelot, the death of the Goddess, and the rise of Christianity.

If you only know about King Arthur through Thomas Mallory’s Le Morte d’Arthur, the stories of the Knights of the Round Table, or T. H. White’s The Sword in the Stone, then you should experience this wonderful book. It will give you a completely different perspective on this well-known legend. Five stars.

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Heather Dixon’s ENTWINED

[image error]ENTWINED is author Heather Dixon’s retelling of the twelve dancing princesses set in a castle in the nineteenth century. At the beginning, the eleven sisters are faced with a double tragedy, the death of a beloved mother when the twelfth sister is born, and the absence of their seemingly cold & callous father.

The rest of this volume takes place over the ensuing year as their father decrees a year of mourning for their mother, before he leaves.

The princesses, now abandoned, have nothing to relieve their grief, until the day the eldest princess, Azalea, rubs her mother’s handkerchief, turning a fireplace into a door.

The rest of the story has all the elements of the traditional Twelve Dancing Princesses story, except that in this version, the sisters dance by themselves, without any princes, except for poor Princess Azalea, who is partnered by the sinister (& devilishly handsome) Keeper.

There were several wonderful touches to this story. I enjoyed the alphabetical naming of the princesses: Azalea, Bramble, Clover, Delphinium, (Primrose) Eve, Flora, Goldenrod, Hollyhock, Ivy, Jessamine, Kale and baby Lily. But it was also a treat to read so much about dancing. On the frontispiece of this volume, is a description of a dance called the The Entwine, which involves a long sash and a waltz. As someone who loves to dance myself, I enjoyed all the talk of dancing.

This tale has a dark underlay to it that balances out all the froth (unavoidable if you are talking about 12 sisters.) If you or a young lady that you know enjoys reading something that is a blend of historical fiction, fantasy, faery and fairy tale, this is the perfect book. Five stars.

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Reading Sundays: THE NON-AFFAIR (Part 5) a short story by Cynthia Sally Haggard

“I’ve never met a woman like you before.”

I held my breath as I cast my eyes down, willing my heart to stop dancing its jagged rhythm. For the first twenty years of my life, I’d melted into the wallpaper, looking out as parties, and dances swirled in front of me, like a dangerous whirlpool. No one had discerned me before. No one had striven hard enough to surmount my natural shyness, see past my gangly figure, ignore my home-made clothes.

Slowly, I lifted my lashes.

He laughed. “You take me too seriously, Caroline.”

I compelled the corners of my mouth to curl up into a smile, not understanding.

He glanced at his watch, forcing me to rise, and leave.

***

I got little sleep that night. What had happened? He’d been so warm, so attentive. Then—what? Had he paid me a compliment when he said he’d never met anyone like me before? Or—or was he laughing at me? My stomach sour, I pushed away tangled sheets and padded to the window in thick socks. Snow was falling outside, dusting everything in a light coating of white, while a cold morning glimmered into being. Today was Saturday, April 2. That meant yesterday had been April 1. Had he been teasing me?

***

I missed his office hours that week and the next, not returning until April 22. His smile warmed his face as I knocked softly upon the door.

“Come in, come in,” he said, “and let me take a look at you. I haven’t seen you in a while.”

I sat tentatively, straight-backed, knees together, while he sprawled in his chair, knees apart, and examined me. I had dressed with more than usual care, [image error]wanting to make the right impression. I was a young lady, and wanted to be treated as such, so I wore my church clothes, a black skirt that came to mid-calf and made me look older, the white blouse with the stiff collar Mother had given me as a gift, and my favorite dark-blue sweater I’d knitted myself. I hoped it brought out the color of my eyes. [To be continued.]

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THE LAND BEYOND THE SEA by Sharon Kay Penman

Although this novel got off to a slow start, I loved discovering the courage, heroism and leadership of a couple of characters I had never heard of before. King Baldwin IV of Jerusalem, born in 1161, succeeded to the throne on the death of his father in 1174 when he was 13. In 1177, at the age of 16, he won an unexpected victory against Saladin (Salah ad-Din)  at the Battle of Montgisard.[image error] He continued to weld his fractious nobles together and keep Saladin at bay until his tragic death at the too-early age of 23 or 24 on 16 March 1185.  This is all the more remarkable given that he contracted leprosy at the age of 10, the disease which killed him.

His achievement is all the more glorious set against what happened after his death. Under the inept leadership of Guy de Lusignan (husband of Baldwin’s sister Sybilla) it took only 30 months for Jerusalem to fall to Saladin in October 1187, following his victory at the Battle of the Horns of Hattin on 4 July 1187.

Hattin decimated the native-born Frankish ruling class of Outremer, who had town-houses in Jerusalem, and country estates in what is now Israel, Palestine, Jordan and Syria. They were unable to put up much of a fight when Saladin appeared 3 months later with a large army outside Jerusalem.

They would have been unable to put up any fight at all, were it not for the second character I so enjoyed reading about, Balian d’Ibelin, a Frankish noble born in Outremer (the land beyond the sea) in the 1140s, who somehow managed to persuade Maria Comnena (the widowed Queen of Baldwin IV’s father) to become his wife. Balian was a native-born lord of Outremer, (not a “foreigner” from France) and so he was thoroughly acculturated to that interesting blend of French and Arabic cultures that existed in Outremer (the Crusader States) in the 1100s. He spoke Arabic well, which was useful when he had to negotiate terms with Saladin, who wanted to enslave 33,000 of the poorer inhabitants of Jerusalem. Somehow, Balian d’Ibelin managed to convince him not to do that, but to allow everyone to leave peacefully and re-settle in the Christian territories of Tripoli and Antioch.

How inspiring to read about two men who used their gifts to help their people and do the right thing! If the coronavirus is making you depressed, I suggest you reach for this novel. Five stars.

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