Integrating the Divine into the Story: Island of Ghosts
So, I didn’t think of this book when I wrote the somewhat recent post about deus ex vs true miracles, but I should have: Island of Ghosts by Gillian Bradshaw offers a perfect example of divine intervention.
You’ve probably read this book, right? If not, I highly recommend it – Bradshaw is my favorite authors for Historicals and this is one of my favorites of her books. This is the one where the Sarmatians have recently been defeated by Rome and a troop of Sarmatian warriors have been brought into the legions of Rome as auxiliaries, as was typical, and this troop has been sent to Roman Britain to defend the Roman areas against the British barbarians. Everything about this novel is great – the sense of place, the characters, the writing, the plot, the themes – if Bradshaw had aimed this novel straight at me, she could hardly have written a story more to my personal taste. (She has others I love as much; there’s a reason she’s my favorite Historical author.)
She also sometimes does a particularly good job of integrating the background metaphysics into the story. Island of Ghosts is one of the novels where this is most obvious.
In this case, that means: the metaphysics is integrated into the story, and the characters believe in the metaphysics. It doesn’t, however, mean that the climactic scenes actually depend on miraculous intervention. In fact, the metaphysics is deniably real in the story; the reader could interpret this aspect of the story as not-real in story terms. But the story gains depth if the reader considers the metaphysics real.
Integrating the divine into the story:
“The gods have been kind to me,” I answered.
“I thank the gods!” he whispered harshly.
This, these types of exclamations and comments, won’t, all by themselves, serve to bring the divine into the story in any real sense. Though the fewer have exclamation points after them, the better for making them feel like they’re based on real belief, because everything with an exclamation point is an exclamation, and those aren’t based on real belief, as a rule. In fact, when the Romans exclaim, “Hercules!” in this novel, this isn’t based on real belief, as the Romans rather famously included all the trappings of religion in their rituals and feast days and so forth without believing, generally speaking, in any of it. An accurate portrayal of Rome is therefore a lot like a shallow fantasy novel, because that’s exactly how shallow worldbuilding in fantasy novels often works.
But that’s not how the Sarmatians behave at all. Among other things, when a Sarmatian swears on fire, it’s an important oath and he’ll keep it. Fire is sacred. This is important in this story, where various people do swear oaths that matter to them. And then there are scenes like this:
***
I woke in the middle of the night to the sound of sobbing. It pulled me from deep sleep, and for a moment I could not remember where or when I was. “Artinisca?” I said, sitting up. “Artinisca, love, don’t cry. I’m here.”
The sobbing stopped abruptly, and as it did, I realized it had not been a child’s sobbing, but the hard, painful gasping of a man. I remembered Eukairios.
“I’m sorry, my lord,” came the slave’s voice out of the darkness, still rough with grief. “I didn’t mean to wake you.”
I dropped onto my back again and stared blindly into the blackness. “No,” I said. “I am sorry that you grieve so for your home.”
“I didn’t mean to complain,” he told me. “You have been very kind. … It’s foreign to me, but it will get better with time. I’ll learn the languages.”
He was speaking to encourage himself. “Yes,” I said. I closed my eyes, willing myself to be still.
“What does artinisca mean? It’s what you said just now, isn’t it?”
I was silent for a long minute. “It is a name,” I said at last. “My little son. He is dead.”
“Oh!” After a moment, “I am sorry, my lord.”
“Yes.” I pressed my hands against my face, trying to stop my own tears at the thought that Artinisca would never wake me in the night again, never; Tirgatao would never get up to pluck him from his cradle and place him between us, round and warm, and slide her slim arm around my back, leaning her head against my own. Never, never, never.
“What do your people say of the dead?” I asked, saying something, anything, rather than gaze into that black chasm. “Do followers of your cult burn them, like the Romans, or do they lay them in the earth?”
“Either, my lord,” Eukairios said after a surprised pause. “Bury if we can, burn if we can’t. We believe that if we have died in faith, it doesn’t matter how our bodies are treated. … What matters is what they were when they lived, not what was done to them afterward.”
“My people believe that when fire destroys the body,” I said, “the soul is destroyed too. Fire is holy, and death pollutes it.”
“If you think fire is holy, shouldn’t it purify death?”
“That is not what we believe of it.”
We were silent for a little while. I imagined Tirgatao burning, and the pain was so great I couldn’t breathe. I spoke. I had to, even though I was weakening myself before, of all people, a miserable slave. “My wife’s body was burned,” I said, “and my little son’s as well.”
***
This is a powerful scene. Waking in the middle of the night to the sound of sobbing is not the sort of context that leads to a philosophical discussion about the disparate religious beliefs of your people. This is a situation that leads people to talk about things that matter. In contrast to facile Roman exclamations about Hercules or whomever, both Ariantes and Eukairios really believe in their religions. This is terrible for Ariantes because of recent events, especially as I snipped out the grimmest part of that conversation. The death of his wife and son were pretty brutal, but my point is, this conversation contains a lot of emotional heft, and this is how Bradshaw puts the metaphysics into the story in a way that matters. This goes way, way beyond exclamations when someone is angry or surprised. She is establishing that her characters really believe in and really care about the metaphysics central to their societies.
Also, whoa, is this a great pet-the-puppy moment or what? By this point in the story, we have already seen that Ariantes is intelligent, thoughtful, and kind – all subtle, by the way, without the author ever saying, “Look, he’s intelligent;” it’s up to the reader to notice because she’s not outlining anything in neon. This is all fine, but not everybody wakes up out of a sound sleep saying, Don’t cry, I’m here, and then tries to comfort the stranger who woke him, even though he is drowning in his own grief right at that exact moment. This is a great pet-the-puppy moment and a great job of establishing character through situation and dialogue. There’s a reason I love so many of Bradshaw’s novels.
So far, Bradshaw has established that metaphysical beliefs are part of the worldbuilding here, and she has made it clear that her characters really do believe in the metaphysics. This doesn’t have anything to do with divine intervention; this is all just (“just”) lending depth to the worldbuilding and the characters.
Then, much later in the story, this:
***
I dreamed I was riding across a wide meadow in the sunshine, riding a strange horse, a beautiful white stallion that stepped as lightly as snow falling. It was early summer and the grass was purple with vetch, red with poppies, and scented with meadowsweet. I rode over a hill and saw my own wagons below me beside a stream, and my own horses grazing beyond them. Tirgatao was sitting beside the campfire, with Artinisca beside her and a baby on her lap. I gave a shout of joy and galloped down to them. She stood as I approached, but when I dismounted, she waved me back with her hand, laughing. Artanasca jumped up and down, shouting, “Daddy! Daddy!” – but he did not clutch my leg.
“Look!” said Tirgatao, and she held up the baby. It was fair-haired and blue-eyed, and smiled into my face. I smiled back, reaching out my finger for it to grab – and then I remembered that it had died before it was born, and I drew back.
“It’s all right,” Tirgatao said, understanding. “I wanted you to see her.”
“You were burned,” I said in a whisper. “My dearest light, they burned you.”
“That doesn’t matter now,” she replied, smiling at me as though I’d made a joke.
There’s a bit more. Then, a little later, Ariantes tells this dream to someone else, like this:
“I met her in a meadow filled with flowers, and the children were with her. The baby as well. And there was another thing that will please you: she gave me a dragon to carry me back to this earth, and it was our dragon, our standard.”
***
Does this dream represent metaphysical reality? Ariantes thinks it does, his men thinks it does, the Roman widow who is the female lead in the slow-burn, gentle, low-angst romance in this story thinks it does. This dream absolutely for sure matters, in the sense that it puts heart into Ariantes for that duel, which is important. Does the dream guarantee victory? No; Ariantes doesn’t think so, not exactly, but he still has this conviction buoying him up when he fights the duel.
He would have wanted to win anyway. There’s the new life he’s built here, and he is certain he has to win this duel in order to safeguard his people. Why did the author put this dream, which may or may not reflect the underlying metaphysical reality, into the story? I imagine that she did it because it felt right, because I default to assuming authors are probably intuitive writers unless they explicitly say otherwise. The more straightforward questions is: what purpose does the dream serve?
It reduces the tragedy in the backstory. The tragedy is still tragic and hard, but seeing your lost loved ones waiting for you in a flowery meadow, laughing, is so much better than thinking their souls have been destroyed by fire.
It provides closure for the protagonist. It gives him permission to move forward with his new life, and this helps the reader agree that yes, he can now build a new life.
It reduces tension before the climactic battle. Setting that dream into the story is like the author patting the reader on the shoulder and saying, “It’s all right, don’t worry, he isn’t going to die, there’s a happy ending.”
But wait! you might cry. Isn’t the author supposed to be all about ratchetting the tension upward? And this is a good counterexample, not to mention one more example of writing advice that is somewhat true still being overly broad. No, the author isn’t supposed to ratchet the tension continually upward. The author is supposed to use tension effectively, and what that means will be different for different stories.
This isn’t a horror novel or a thriller. It’s a romance. A slow-burn, low-angst romance with zero spice, so readers who expect angsty in-your-face erotica might not even notice. But it’s still romance, which means a happily-ever-after or happily-for-now ending is guaranteed, and this is one reason why dialing the tension back might work.
But I think there’s another reason. I think Bradshaw meant that dream as a reflection of the real metaphysics underlying the world of the story, and the lift Ariantes experiences therefore comes from something true – true in story terms, I mean. And that means that in this story, the metaphysics that underlies the world is, way down deep, fundamentally generous.
In writing the story this way, including the dream, Bradshaw has created a deeper level of thematic coherence. Ariantes is, among other admirable qualities, kind. A secondary character who first seems brutish and unkind turns out to be kind. The romance is not just slow and low-angst, it’s a kind romance. And on top of all that, way down deep, the metaphysical reality of the story is not just present, but this metaphysics is also kind. If the author hadn’t included the dream, that would have been lacking, and the story would have lost some of its deep coherence. That’s what I think that dream, and Ariantes’ emotional experience of that dream, is really doing there.
I already realized, and a lot of you probably did too, that Island of Ghosts was certainly an inspiration for the Ugaro in the Tuyo world at a shallow worldbuilding level (wagons, tombs, honor). I’m not surprised to feel now that the fundamentally generous sensibility in this novel, and Bradshaw’s novels generally, probably also constituted a different level of inspiration.
As a side note, Bradshaw also does something like this in A Beacon at Alexandria and also in Render Unto Caesar. In each case, this is not a huge or dramatic element of the worldbuilding or the plot. You could practically blink and miss it. Yet, in each case, including a hint of the metaphysical reality underlying the story does the same basic thing – it adds thematic depth and coherence.
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