C.P. Lesley's Blog, page 56

Martyrs and Misfits

A few months back, I wrote a post on “Difficult Characters.” It’s hard to imagine a more difficult character than John Knox—who in the words of Marie Macpherson, the author of The First Blast of the Trumpet (Knox Robinson Publishing, 2012) and the guest featured in my latest interview for New Books in Historical Fiction, gets credit for “banning Christmas, football on Sundays,” and more.

Knox was the driving force behind the Reformation in Scotland, the sixteenth-century version of a born-again Christian who fell under the spell of a charismatic preacher, George Wishart, and carried on his mentor’s crusade to reform the Scottish Church after Wishart was burned at the stake for heresy. In doing so, Knox risked coming to the same end, but he pressed on, undeterred, and eventually triumphed.

Committed zealots, indifferent to if not actively seeking martyrdom, are never comfortable for the rest of us. We might consider them the epitome of difficult characters. But for that very reason, they enliven our fiction. As readers, we get to admire their devotion despite the sneaking suspicion that we would be in their figurative gun sights if we ever ran into them in person. And the effort to understand them enhances our appreciation of the human condition as a whole—which is, ultimately, the purpose of fiction.

John Knox left almost no information about his life before the age of thirty-three, when he was already a major figure in the Reformation. Perhaps he consciously or unconsciously imitated Jesus, of whose childhood and youth we know little. Perhaps he had something to hide. Perhaps he simply saw his own past as irrelevant to the overwhelming importance of his mission. We will never know. But Marie Macpherson has done a wonderful job of imagining Knox and his world.

You can find out all about her approach, the historical characters whose lives she re-creates (and in some cases re-imagines), and the research that went into her story by listening to our interview. As always, the podcasts are free to listen to and to download.

And for a quite separate interview exchange about Five Directions Press and Triskele Books, another writers’ cooperative based in the United Kingdom, see “Five Directions Press—Author Collectives I.” I will repost both sides of the exchange here next Friday.

Taking the Veil

In last week’s post I talked a bit about medieval women in Russia and the lands to its west. I thought I’d exhausted that subject. But while conducting my next New Books in Historical Fiction interview (on which, more next time) and in conjunction with finishing Anya Seton’s Katherine, which I mentioned in that prior post, I realized that I had completely omitted another option available to medieval Christian women, both Catholic and Orthodox—one that the Reformation, for all its benefits, took away. This option was life as a nun or an anchoress.

The appeal of the religious option may not be obvious at first glance. Did nuns not swear obedience to their order? Did they not endure the dominance of the male clergy, all of whom had greater prestige and religious authority simply by virtue of bearing a Y chromosome (not that anyone in the Middle Ages had ever heard of a chromosome)? Did they not live in poverty and chastity as well as obedience?

Yes, they did, at least some of the time. But in a world where marriages existed to secure economic and political alliances, people thought nothing of wedding a teenage girl to an elderly roué, affection appeared after the ceremony if at all, the absence of reliable contraception ensured a steady stream of infants, and about half the married female population died in childbirth or from complications of pregnancy and labor, the attractiveness of life in a convent—surrounded by and under the immediate rule of other women, free from the everyday demands of men and infants—could not be denied.

Moreover, medieval convents were a good deal laxer than the modern variety. The Church as a whole was a good deal laxer in Catholic Europe, where sinners could buy their way out of Purgatory through indulgences and donations to the right saints and shrines. Convents were places for stashing the unmarriageable daughters and unwanted wives of the nobility. Nuns brought dowries to their future homes. That was how convents maintained themselves, together with donations of land and cash from grateful supporters. The better the dowry, the better a nun’s chances for admission to the convent and advancement afterward. Some convents refused to accept women of moderate or limited means. And although nuns tended to prize their vows of chastity more highly than priests and monks, romantic interludes (and the resultant scandals) were not unheard of.

Convents also entertained exalted female guests—ladies who did not take the veil but retreated for a bit of peace and quiet (and, no doubt, relief from importunate husbands and rowdy children). Women could undertake pilgrimages, like the Wife of Bath in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales—a lesser commitment than donning a nun’s habit, perhaps, but no less heartfelt. The rare woman might choose to become an anchoress, shutting herself away from the world in a small cell and living on the bounty of those around her. Perhaps the most famous of these in the English context is the 14th-century Dame Julian of Norwich (pictured above), the author of Revelations of Divine Love. She appears in Seton’s Katherine, guiding the heroine along the essential part of her journey toward self-realization and mature love. The journey itself may not perfectly encapsulate a 14th-century sensibility, but Katherine’s focus on salvation and repentance gives an intriguing glimpse into a path to self-fulfillment not often embraced by modern Western culture.

None of this is intended to undercut the true vocation of nuns and other religious women then and now. No doubt the lives of anchoresses, pilgrims, and nuns contained many hardships and much testing of faith. But it is also worth remembering that convents and even the isolated cells of anchoresses offered a rare opportunity in the pre-modern world for women to acquire an education, define a mission for themselves, and exercise power and responsibility over their daily lives.

This post wraps up my mini-survey of medieval women, on and off the steppe. Next week, on to something new!

Image of Dame Julian of Norwich © 2007 Evelyn Simak, reused under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license. From the Church of SS Andrew and Mary, photographed as part of the Geograph Project.

Ladies of the House

When I posted “Women of Steel” a couple of months ago, I promised to write a comparative post about European women in the sixteenth century—Russians and those who lived to their west. Here, even more than with the nomads, the popular perception portrays women as downtrodden creatures, lacking in rights. But is that true?

To a large extent, yes. A bit less so in Russia, where women had the right to own property, retained control over their dowries, and could sue men who raped them in court. Otherwise, their situation differed little from their sisters who lived farther west.

There, even great heiresses became wards of the king, bound to accept his whimsical disposition of their futures. Girls owed obedience to their fathers or guardians until they married, then to their husbands. Marriages were arranged by parents or, if a girl had no parents, by her lord or the king, depending on her social standing. Chastity and submissiveness were the virtues expected of women. Book learning had little place, especially for females—assumed to be incapable of rational thought, prey to wandering wombs and the temptations of Eve, with minds barely superior to those of animals.

These women would have found Gulbadan’s level of freedom intoxicating, even though nomadic girls did not pick their marriage partners either. Love as a component of marriage concerned few people until the mid-nineteenth century; before then, economics and politics determined most matches. People hoped, at best, that affection would grow between a couple over the years. Sometimes it did. Just as often, it didn’t.

One’s place on the social hierarchy mattered, of course. Poverty constrained men as well as women. Knights had to follow the dictates of their lords; sons adopted the professions of their fathers. Only those at the very top determined their own destinies, and then only in part. But men had permission to take out their frustrations on their wives and daughters. Throughout Christian Europe, wife beating was common and rarely viewed as a crime. Women had no right to retaliate in kind. Most of the time, no one listened if they complained. Only if they died might the courts take notice, and that was far from guaranteed.

This experience of womanhood finds full expression in Anya Seton’s novel Katherine, published in 1954, which I happen to be re-reading for a Goodreads group. Rich in historical detail and with an appealing, ill-done-to heroine, Katherine captures the full panoply of injustices committed against a woman of moderate means—in this case, in mid-fourteenth-century England. Fifteen when the novel begins, Katherine endures marriage to a man she does not love and such extreme poverty, despite being a knight’s lady, that she cannot change her dress for six months. John of Gaunt, duke of Lancaster, eventually rescues her and makes her his mistress. Her inability to care for herself pays off in a brighter future of love and affluence, if tarred by the impossibility of marriage to her exalted lover. But how many women lived only the first half of her life? Stories like these are the reason why I put off writing my Russian novels for so long and, when I did turn to them, decided to make my heroine a Tatar instead.

At the same time, Katherine reveals the hidden flaw in the conventional view of medieval and early modern European women. The ones most vulnerable were the young, the single, and the poor. Despite the many disadvantages under which they labored, elite wives throughout Christian Europe ran their households alone while their men were at war. Since medieval and modern Europe spent more time at war than at peace, crusaders could disappear for a decade, knights for months or years. In an age when medicine killed more than it cured, many warriors who left returned in coffins, if at all.

In the lord’s absence, the lady of the house had complete control over an enterprise that might involve several hundred people engaged in numerous different trades as well as agriculture and husbandry: a small corporation, if you like. Even husbands in residence did not concern themselves with the running of the household—disdainfully dismissed as women’s work—although they might sit down with the bailiff long enough to plan the crops or wring a few more gold coins out of the estate for a new set of armor. Wealthy widows enjoyed considerable power and seldom had anything to gain from remarriage.

Natalya, Daniil’s mother in The Golden Lynx, is this kind of woman. In the days of female employment outside the home, we have forgotten the luster that once clung to the word “housewife,” but Natalya reminds us of its lost glory. She may pay lip service to the idea of female subservience. She may seek guidance from her priest and refrain from arguing (much) with her husband. But she does not hesitate to rule her children, her daughters-in-law, and her servants. She does not doubt her skills for a second. Amid a society determined to breed women like Katherine, Natalya is evidence that another model nonetheless thrived.

So let’s raise a toast to the lady of the house. After all, that’s her mead you’re drinking.

The picture at the top is Konstantin Makovskii's Cup of Mead, painted in the 1880s. It is in the public domain in the United States because of its age.

A Free People

The Kazakh Steppe
Screen Shot from Nomad: The Warrior

In honor of Independence Day, which we here in the United States celebrated yesterday, I thought it might be fun to explore different concepts of freedom. As a student of the steppe peoples, I recognize that the word “freedom” doesn’t leap to mind in connection with Genghis Khan. On the contrary, Genghis represents pretty much the antithesis of freedom to most Westerners. Yet his people—and his descendants—regarded themselves as free.

By their definition, moreover, we might be considered unfree. Whereas they could pick up their houses at any moment to follow their herds, we remain in one place and with one company for years and move, if we move at all, from one walled location to another. Whereas they lived in small camps that coalesced only for brief periods into larger units and changed leaders as seemed best to them, making rules that met the needs of the moment, we pledge allegiance to large states and to standing governments that enact laws that we are then bound to uphold whether we like them or not. As voters, we do influence policy, but mostly in election years.

We elect leaders to represent us; theirs often took power by virtue of their genealogy—most notably their descent from Genghis Khan—and by acclamation. But the steppe peoples, too, had councils of elders who decided their tribe’s future and voted to support this decision or that. We use ballot boxes to cast our votes; they used horses—riding in to attend a council, riding off if they didn’t like the results. When, in Sergei Bodrov’s film Nomad, the tribal leader Barak says, “We Kazakhs have always been a free people,” he means that he owes allegiance to no outside force. Minutes later, he and half a dozen other leaders jump on their horses and go rather than agree to unite against a common enemy. Even in a grand quriltai (intertribal council), the would-be khan issued invitations. Potential allies voted by showing up. Those who remained unconvinced stayed away. If no one attended, the khan’s hopes fizzled.

Libertarians might well find themselves comfortable with the steppe idea of freedom, although probably not with the other component of steppe governance, which Joseph Fletcher calls “the Turco-Mongolian tradition of the grand khan—the supra-tribal nomad emperor whose authority entailed kingship over a multi-tribal nomadic people, combined with a highly personal command over that people’s collective military forces.”* The grand khan—Genghis is the greatest and most memorable example, but far from the only one—encapsulates everything we in the West imagine about the Mongol empire: a ruler demanding absolute obedience and personal loyalty from his (occasionally her) followers. The exact opposite of democracy and freedom, except …

Except for one thing. The steppe is vast and sparsely populated, land that can support large numbers of animals but only if they spread out—beautiful but stark, arid as the hills of northern California. Few individuals could muster the energy, never mind the resources, to control this enormous area with its many disparate and unruly tribes. And since all leadership was personal, the despotic authority of a successful khan dissipated on his death. The tribes could choose a new leader, but that new leader had to form alliances, fight off contenders, escape assassination attempts, and keep supporters happy with raids and plunder until he (more rarely she) emerged victorious with a coalition mighty enough to establish another transitory empire. The whole process took years. Together with the concept of fictional kinship and the consequences of polygamy, which I’ll address in other posts, this political system forms the backdrop to The Winged Horse (and, no doubt, later books in the series).

Meanwhile, the clan and tribal elders jockeyed for power and kept their eyes peeled for alternative candidates. If they didn’t like what the new leader had planned, they packed up their tents, mounted their horses, and left to support another descendant of Genghis or just to hang out in the steppe until someone made them an offer they couldn’t refuse. This choice—to stay or to go—the steppe peoples regarded as freedom.

Paradoxically—and I am indebted to Fletcher for this insight—what turned the steppe system from raw democracy mixed with intermittent autocracy into despotism proper was the imposition of the grand khan as a rulership model on settled peoples. The Ottoman empire and, for the most part, early modern Russia were states with large peasant populations—people who, like us, lived in houses and hence could not simply pick up and go when they didn’t like what was happening. The escape valve of the steppe closed, and the ability to pick the leader to whom you owed absolute personal loyalty (until s/he died or you changed your mind) became instead the requirement to fulfill without question the demands of a monarch who ruled by divine right (Russia) or after eliminating all his rivals (Ottoman Turkey). Those monarchs did not rule by acclamation, and they did not need to recreate their alliances with each generation.

And so, on this Independence Day weekend, it seems worthwhile to me to appreciate the gifts that our forefathers (and foremothers) gave us while acknowledging that other systems, very different from ours, can also define liberty in ways that we can recognize, even if we don’t subscribe to their values or want their particular form of freedom for ourselves.

Isn’t that, in the end, what fiction is for—to allow us to experience the lives of others, so that we can grasp the extraordinary beauty and diversity of our world?

*Joseph Fletcher, “Turco-Mongolian Monarchic Tradition in the Ottoman Empire,” Harvard Ukrainian Studies 3–4 (1979–80), pt. 1, 236. Fletcher’s article gave me the idea for this post.

Fotopedia is currently hosting a lovely photo essay on the steppe, “Kyrgyzstan: Nomads on Top of the World,” by Lekkertrekken.nl. You need not be a member to see the story, but note that the photographer has reserved all rights to the pictures.

Forward or Back?

I’ve spent the last few weeks pushing forward on The Winged Horse. My hope is to finish the rough draft by midsummer, so that I have a couple of months to fill in the missing sections and pull the plot into a single, more or less coherent thread before editing for clichés and style and all that good stuff. With luck, I’ll have the book in press by late fall, although as the days fly together and coalesce into weeks, that hope seems increasingly illusory. Still, it’s not (yet) impossible. I can dream.

But eighteen chapters in, it’s not always easy to remember exactly how I set up the story in the beginning. Did the bey join his son in drinking wine, or did he hold out for the nomadic favorite—fermented mare’s milk (koumiss)? Was the heroine present when her father stumbled? What, exactly, did they say?

Those questions sent me back to the beginning of the book looking for answers. I read it in the ePub version, as a reader would, to get the overall flow of the story—only to discover that after a rollicking if incomplete start, my hero and heroine came to a screeching halt in chapters 2, 3, and 4. I could feel my eyelids getting heavy, like the hypnosis patient in an old film. I became itchy, then annoyed, at these people who spent pages lost in thought.

I know, of course, why that happened. Nor need my readers fear that I ever intended to send the book to print with thirty-five pages of nonstop telling. My characters don’t (usually) emerge full-blown; instead, they play a kind of peekaboo, darting out to drop a line or three before ducking back behind the grilled screen, where they hover vaguely while I pound my head thinking of something for them to do that will reveal their souls to me. One option is just to let their thoughts flow, so that I can see what really moves them when they are not buffing their images for other people. Then, when I understand who they are and what they want, I can begin to write dialogue for them that both reveals their surface concerns and hints at those secrets they don’t dare share with the world because, like all of us, they fear mockery or humiliation or opposition.

After eighteen chapters, I have a good sense of Ogodai and Firuza, even Tulpar. I also have a better sense than when I started of nomadic society and how it functioned. Many things need to change in those opening chapters, some of them fundamental.

But should I go back and change them now or press on, as I originally intended, to the ending before returning to fix the beginning? It’s not as easy a question as it appears. Fundamental changes may alter the ending, so I may benefit from fixing the underlying plot line first. Yet rewriting—however necessary—can also be a form of procrastination. It’s so tempting to go back to the safe and familiar, the already written, rather than push on to a still murky future.

In the end, I went back: in part because I could see the solution and didn’t want to lose track of it; in part because my writing schedule at present, which allows about a day and a half of free-flow concentration plus whatever revisions I can cram onto my iPad in the evenings, doesn’t really provide the space for moving forward; and in part because I realized that at least one of the changes I had come up with would alter the story’s final resolution. So I will stay with revisions for a while, knowing that I still have two weeks of vacation (plus the July 4 long weekend) to push the plot to its conclusion.

What do you do, fellow writers, in the same situation?

Crossing the Line

I would guess that everyone reading this post has, at one time or another, made a choice that to some extent violated his or her moral principles. Not necessarily a criminal choice: a lie told to avert some unpleasant consequence (or spare someone else’s feelings), a cookie filched too close to dinner, a rule broken or a speed limit exceeded, even an error made by a store clerk and not pointed out because it operated in the customer’s favor—small transgressions like these are part of the fabric of life.

Everyone makes mistakes, and most of us try to justify them—at least up to the point where their costs become impossible to deny. Fictional characters, too, must make mistakes if they are to appear human. Indeed, they get to make the big mistakes, the ones most of us don’t dare attempt. By reading about the characters’ bad choices, the ways they rationalize those choices, and the harm they suffer as a result, we the readers experience the joys of giving into temptation without paying any greater price than the cost of the book. Writers get a similar shot in the arm from imagining themselves, via their villains and heroes, crossing the moral lines, entering forbidden realms.

This deeply human experience forms the backbone of The Art Forger, whose author, B. A. Shapiro, I interview in the latest addition to New Books in Historical Fiction (NBHF). All the characters cross at least one moral boundary; most push past several. Some grow from the experience; others don’t. But their individual paths blend and overlap like Claire’s art, and the results are fascinating. It’s not hard to see why this book is moving steadily up the New York Times bestseller list for trade paperbacks.

The rest of this post comes from the NBHF site, where you can find the podcast interview itself.

Claire Roth can’t believe her luck when the owner of Boston’s most prestigious art gallery offers her a one-woman show. Of course, there’s a catch: he asks her to copy a painting. A small price to pay to revive her stalled career, Claire thinks—until she discovers that the painting in question is Degas’s After the Bath, stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum as part of the greatest art heist in history.

But as Claire wrestles with her conscience and tackles the Degas, she begins to suspect that the painting is no more “original” than her reproduction. Who forged it, and how has the imitation defied detection for so long? The answers depend on another moral line crossed more than a century ago.

The Art Forger has as many layers as one of Claire’s paintings. Join us as B. A. Shapiro  talks about boundaries and choices, forgery and art, celebrity and value, the viewpoint of a visual artist, the trials of publishing and the joys of writing a bestselling novel—and “Belle” Gardner, who once walked lions down a Boston street and shocked the stuffy Brahmins with her low-cut gowns.

Reining In

Despite my admiration for steppe heroines, I can’t help noting how quickly their strength can dissipate, leaving me wondering how much is culture and how much, for lack of a better word, necessity. This point intruded on my thoughts when I read, after many delays, Rumer Godden’s Gulbadan: Portrait of a Rose Princess at the Mughal Court (London: Macmillan, 1980) for the Dead Writers Society, a GoodReads group.

I already knew about Gulbadan—the daughter of Babur “the Tiger” (1483–1530), the descendant of Emir Timur (Tamerlane) and Genghis Khan. Babur was the only foreign ruler to conquer and hold Afghanistan and the founder of India’s Mughal dynasty, which remained in power until ousted by the British in the mid-nineteenth century. He set the stage; his sons and grandsons built on it, eventually bringing most of Hindustan under their sway.

I first encountered Gulbadan in Ruby Lal’s Domesticity and Power in the Mughal World (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005). From there, I hunted down and read Gulbadan’s memoir of her brother, the Humayun-nama, perhaps the first autobiography ever written by a woman and available in English as a public-domain e-book. I picked up Rumer Godden’s version because I thought it was a novel; the author had been a novelist, after all. I was looking for the kind of emotional insight and sensory information about harem life—especially in the peripatetic environment depicted by Lal—that I expect a good novel to provide.

I did not find it. Instead, I discovered a paraphrase of Gulbadan’s own memoirs, enlivened by numerous instances of the gorgeous Mughal/Persian miniatures typical of that time and place. The speculation about how harem life felt to someone involved in it is so anachronistic and, well, speculative that it is effectively useless. For a while, I couldn’t decide how to approach this blog post: the book seemed such a waste of time.

But when I thought about Gulbadan’s life—as she describes it, as Godden describes it, as Lal describes it—it struck me how constrained it seems compared to the lives of her contemporaries on the steppe. Gulbadan was born in 1521 or 1522, which makes her three or four years younger than my fictional Nasan and six years younger than Firuza. Little more than a decade had passed since the death of Manduhai the Wise. Yet Gulbadan spends most of her life going where she is told and staying there, whether she likes it or not, until a shift of power among her menfolk permits her to travel to some preferable destination. She marries and produces children but does not record the date of her wedding, her feelings for her husband, the birth of her sons. These things are irrelevant to her record of her brother Humayun’s life. So, too, are harem politics. The minutiae of women’s existence remain unexplored. Men go to war; women remain behind, to be captured or left to await their fate, placidly or otherwise.

I don’t mean by this description that women in early Mughal India had no power. Quite the contrary. In the accounts of Gulbadan and others, older women wield considerable authority as advisers, even ministers. They demand that the emperor visit them and pressure him to marry. Women warriors guard the harem, itself a fluid concept in a world constantly on the move, but these women are already, for the most part, lower-class. Women ride out on picnics, clad in “head-to-foot” dresses one step away from today’s Afghan burka. Prospective brides have opinions about the husbands selected for them, even if that husband turns out to be the reigning emperor. Some brides are beloved and travel everywhere with their husbands, like Hamida Banu Begum, Humayun’s favorite wife and the mother of the emperor known as Akbar (the Great). Gulbadan herself urges Akbar, her nephew, to permit her to make the hajj—not a trivial undertaking for a woman living in northwest India in the late sixteenth century —and stays away for years, completing the pilgrimage four times before she chooses to return.

And yet … a few generations away from nomadic life, and the dream of the warrior heroine appears already lost. If Nasan represents one end of the spectrum of medieval Eurasian women’s lives, and Gaukhar, Hocha, and Firuza sit somewhere in the middle, then Gulbadan anchors the other end, not yet completely subservient but well on her way to becoming so. Can the role of harem beauty lie much farther down the trail?

Power takes many forms, some more effective and more visible than others. What is won can be reversed—and reversed again. I’ll talk about that in a couple of weeks.

The second picture is of Hamida Banu Begum, who became Gulbadan’s best friend among the women of their family.
Source: Wikimedia Commons
This picture is in the public domain.

Rule by the Strong

Or the Joys (and Perils) of Research

This week I took a writing vacation, by which I mean a vacation where I could write, not a vacation from writing. I’ve done this several times in the last few years, and it’s absolute bliss. The usual perks of vacation still apply: time to relax, time to fritter away on the Web looking for cool pictures, time to spend with friends or linger over a meal, no need to bolt out of bed just because the alarm clock has gone off, and so on. And although it took my coworkers until Friday to stop e-mailing me, they eventually did. I’m hoping the silence lasts until Monday, when the deluge is set to resume.

Of course, since I haven’t left home, the small annoyances of life—bills, chores—remain. Still, I have time to deal with them. Because on a writing vacation I don’t, in fact, sleep in. I leap out of bed, eager to find out what my characters will do and say today. If I could afford it, I would spend every day in just this way. Sell about 500 more books per month than I currently do, and I’ll be there.

Until that glorious day arrives, I have the writing vacation. Which makes it rather strange that seven days into my precious nine, I have written not much more than I do on a normal weekend. Did I have so many unpaid bills? Should I have skipped the lunch or dinner party, stayed out of the grocery store, left the clothes unwashed?

No. I have written less than I planned because I realized three days in that the vacation offered a perfect chance to do some research. At the end of six to eight hours of editing, I cannot read a serious article or book and expect anything to stick. These relatively stress-free days offered the perfect occasion to finish that half-read dissertation on steppe politics and revisit various books and articles—all of which have significantly improved my understanding of life in Kazan, Crimea, and the steppe in the 1530s.

Fortunately, nothing I discovered requires major changes to my story. On the contrary, the new information fills in missing pieces (my other big project for the week), explains certain decisions that had not made sense to me before, and firms up the plot’s political spine. It also supplies some much-needed terminology and suggests a possible resolution—more accurately, two possible resolutions—to the central story problem.

Which leaves me wrestling with the decision as to which solution works best. Leadership on the steppe operated according to a fairly simple principle: strength ruled. Khans had to descend from Genghis, but beyond that, most of the time, the strongest candidate eliminated or subordinated rival candidates until he established a personal power base. At that point, he sent his new army on one campaign or raid after another, to secure booty and keep them happy and united. The whole time, the tribes watched him for signs of weakness and, if they found them, tried to figure out who the next victor would be so they could switch sides at the right moment. When the khan died, the struggle resumed among a new set of candidates. The Mughals and Ottomans, also former steppe peoples, used similar tactics.

This much I had known. But I had not fully grasped what that tradition meant for my hero, Ogodai, whose job in life is to separate himself from the learned wisdom of his father, grow beyond the role of competent second-in-command, and make his own decisions—as any leader must.

The antagonist who pushes Ogodai to grow in this way is his older half-brother, Tulpar (named after the Winged Horse of the book’s title). Their father has cast Tulpar off and declared him dead to their family for committing the ultimate steppe sin of disobedience. Tulpar, not surprisingly, has built up a ton of resentment that he’s ready to dump on the first family member unlucky enough to cross his path: Ogodai—who before he has even assimilated the idea that his older brother is not literally dead finds himself locked in a life-or-death struggle for his girl and the tribe he hopes will name him khan. Like any good antagonist, Tulpar represents the risk Ogodai runs if he changes, the part of himself that he has suppressed, and the road that he must take if he is to reach his destiny.

So far, so good, but at some point the life-or-death struggle has to result in a decisive victory for one side or the other. Can both men survive, or does Ogodai sign his own death warrant if he fails to kill his brother? And if he just sticks with the old ways, has he really grown up?

Guess I need another writing vacation to find out.

One more fun fact: The Golden Lynx appears on the Swarthmore College 2013 Summer Reading List.

Women of Steel

It may surprise people who have read my second novel, The Golden Lynx, to learn that in the book’s earliest incarnation the story revolved around the interfamily relationships of two Russian clans, one of which would later go down in history as the Romanovs. No lynxes and, as originally conceived, no Tatars. There was a murder; the whole point of the series was to show a young Russian noble couple in the 1530s solving crimes, because at the time men and women lived largely separate lives, so the husband and wife moved in different spheres and could collect different types of information, which made it possible for them to succeed together as neither could alone.

A good idea that didn’t come off, not least because of my own inexperience as a writer. I didn’t create enough conflict between the couple (okay, I didn’t create any) or between them and the other members of the household. I made the classic rookie mistake: I loved my characters too much to let them suffer. Everyone was too nice.

But by the second draft, the Tatars had sneaked in. It came about quite naturally. Elite Russian women in the 1530s lived under many restrictions: they could not interact with men outside their immediate families (although they could boss around their male servants); they could not leave the house except to attend church, visit female relatives, or take part in court/noble functions such as weddings. They were not—and are not, as anyone who has traveled to Russia can attest—weak, but society valued them for obedience, subservience, and passive virtue. Young women especially (on older women, and the power of traditionally raised women generally, see a future post).

These traits make them difficult heroines for a modern writer to work with. The number of readers today who want to read detailed descriptions of sweet, submissive women engaged in embroidery and domestic management, important as those things were and are, is fairly small. So the heroine, then known as Marina, became a half-Tatar so that she could impress her future husband with her horsemanship and her daredevil approach to life. Years later, when I re-conceived the story, she became Nasan, a full Tatar, raised among the nomads.

Only then did I discover that, despite the impact of harems and Islam (the harems preceded the adoption of Islam) on the lives of Tatar women, the steppe peoples have a long and honorable tradition of warrior heroines. The Amazons allegedly were based on the Scythians, another, much earlier nomadic tribal confederation. Less than thirty years before The Golden Lynx opens, a Mongol woman ruled over the restored empire of Genghis Khan, which she herself had reunited through success in war and smart political maneuvering. Her name was Mandukhai (Manduhai), and she died sometime before 1510. The people of Mongolia still revere her as Manduhai the Wise.

I was thrilled. In this tradition I saw possibilities for a strong heroine who could defend her rights and aspire to a destiny of her choosing without being anachronistically feminist. And the tradition itself was so different from what most of us in the West think of as the lot of medieval women—especially among a group of people whom we have typically (and very unfairly, as I also discovered) scorned as primitive and uncultured.

Of course, the reality of steppe women’s lives turns out to be more complex than the sagas. Nomadic women worked (and work) hard, mostly in traditional female occupations such as milking cows, making dairy foods and felt, cooking, cleaning, clothing their families, and caring for children, the elderly, and the sick. The men took care of the herds and went to war. The folklore of warrior women certainly existed, but the reality included a lot more drudgery than glory. Moreover, men often captured women as wives and concubines. You beat an opponent; you had your pick of his women. Women were valuable, but the line between women and property sometimes stretched pretty thin.

But that was only one side of the story. On the whole, women among the Turkic tribes equaled or surpassed their husbands in age. As a result, they usually made the first move in the relationship and decided how far it would go and how fast. Marriage tended to reflect the decisions of parents, but the couple had the right to decide the level of intimacy. Genghis Khan went so far as to outlaw the capture of wives, which he saw as a source of dissension within his army, although his descendants conveniently forgot that part of the Great Law.

Women could own property—like their Russian but unlike their Western counterparts. They had, through their connection with the hearth fire and with birth, exceptionally strong shamanic power. And although they might be captured in battle, they were seldom killed (the same rule applied to children). In fact, in a kind of reverse chivalry, steppe men abandoned their women and children to the enemy while riding off to save themselves. There is a wonderful example of this in Sergei Bodrov’s film Mongol, where Börte, seeing an enemy tribe closing in, whips her wounded husband’s horse and urges it to escape across the river while she allows herself to be captured. It seems passive, but it’s not. It’s a declaration of her love, a conscious act of acceptance. She will survive if captured; her husband will not.

Something similar happens in Nomad: The Warrior, another Bodrov film, when the heroine, Gaukhar, agrees to marry the antagonist Sharish—and stop attacking his men with her dagger—because he promises to spare her brother if she cooperates. The hero, Mansur, kills Sharish before he can claim Gaukhar, but when Sharish’s people then ensnare Mansur, he doesn’t rescue Gaukhar. She rescues him.

And she has to rescue him, because Sharish’s mother, having watched Mansur survive two trials, has decided to take matters into her own hands. She grabs a handy viper and poisons the milk sent to honor the victorious hero whom the enemy khan has agreed to release on the morrow; only Gaukhar’s intervention protects him from a female enmity more implacable than anything the men can produce. Another woman—Hocha, the enemy khan’s daughter—has already risked her life to save Mansur by offering him marriage. He refuses, presumably because he loves Gaukhar. Therefore, it is Gaukhar who saves him. (For more on Nomad as a film, see “The Wild East.”)

Gaukhar represents a different kind of steppe heroine from Nasan: one more comfortable in traditional feminine roles. My new protagonist, Firuza in The Winged Horse, is this kind of character. She doesn’t swing a sword like Nasan or envision herself as an Amazon, but she knows what she wants, and she is determined to let no one stand in her path. Each of them, in her own way, is a worthy descendant of Princess Chichek of legend and Queen Manduhai of reality. Women of steel, even if they don’t leap tall buildings in a single bound.




Gaukhar Rescuring Mansur from the Jungar Camp
Screen shot from Nomad: The Warrior (2005)

Hocha, daughter of the Jungar khan
Screen shot from Nomad: The Warrior (2005)

Morocco with Mary

I discovered the Mary Russell novels the same way that Russell discovered Holmes: by accident. A bookworm for as long as I can remember, I find solace browsing libraries and bookstores. The treasure trove that is Amazon.com appeals to me for its variety and comprehensiveness, but it in no way matches the bliss of walking through stacks of physical books: their smell, the heft of them, the hush that surrounds them. Whereas other people shop for clothes, jewelry, or shoes, given half a chance I lose myself in a bookstore.

On that particular day, I had no idea what I was looking for. Mystery stories are one of the genres that appeal to me, and I happened to be in that aisle. Why I picked, of the many options available, The Beekeeper's Apprentice, I have no idea. At the time, I wasn't even a Sherlock Holmes fan, although I had enjoyed the films The Seven-Percent Solution and The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes.

Whatever. I picked up the book, and there was fifteen-year-old Mary Russell, roaming the Sussex Downs with her nose in a book until she almost tripped over the great detective. A kindred soul! Is it any wonder that, twelve books later, when I became host of New Books in Historical Fiction, interviewing the author, Laurie R. King, was high on my wish list?

Fortunately, Laurie was busy the first time I approached her, because that would have been the interview I had to re-record due to general idiocy in the management of audio software (for that incident, see “Less Than Perfect”). I might never have had the nerve to ask her twice. But finally, her schedule cleared, and the interview is live at New Books in Historical Fiction.

Note that Skype was not on its best behavior on Tuesday. It gave me a better connection to Kyiv than it did to California. Go figure. But most of the sound is clear, and if something sounds a bit dicey, hang in there: it will clear up fast.

The rest of this post comes from the NBHF site.

Morocco in 1924 has political factions to spare. A rebellion in the Rif Mountains threatens to oust Spain from its protectorate in the north—a response to Spanish mistreatment of the local population, itself driven by the desire to avenge seven centuries of Moorish domination. The Germans worry about the iron mines barred to them by the revolt. South of the mountains, the French fight in vain to defend a line drawn without regard to traditional tribal or geographical boundaries. Britain fears that it will lose access to the Mediterranean if the French succeed. Meanwhile, the Rifi, under the leadership of the Abd-el-Krim brothers, are not the only leaders determined to rule an independent Morocco. The corrupt but charismatic Raisuli (al-Raisuni) has no intention of standing aside for a pair of military upstarts, however gifted.

Into this hotbed of unrest strolls a moving picture crew intent on filming the desert at sunrise. The crew includes Mary Russell, the wife and partner of Sherlock Holmes. When the great detective himself returns from a side trip to discover that Mary was last seen days before, heading into the mountains in the company of an unknown child, her unexplained absence pulls Holmes and Russell into a web of threads that criss-cross to create a true garment of shadows.

Join me as I discuss Garment of Shadows (Bantam Books, 2012)—the latest, wonderful addition to Mary Russell’s memoirs—with Miss Russell’s faithful literary agent, Laurie R. King.

Mary Russell Holmes has her own blog, which she maintains with some regularity as new volumes of her adventures appear. She has been supplying her agent with manuscripts for some time: the first volume is The Beekeeper’s Apprentice. To find out why Russell abandoned the hallowed halls of Oxford to work for Flytte Films, read The Pirate King, the previous book in the series. Either way, seek her out. You will not regret the decision.