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With SBJ's kind permission, the explanations he thoughtfully provided are shared here. @thebrakespearevoyage-blog
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With SBJ's kind permission, the explanations he thoughtfully provided are shared here. @thebrakespearevoyage-blog
It's a Dale's Ramblings Christmas special, as we round out Volume Nine with a mammoth review of BBC Books' inaugural Short Trips collection. Nearly 17,000 words. Fifteen stories.
Merry Christmas, you lucky people.
And so, an ending. With the release of Short Trips, the BBC Books range has finally overcome one of the last major hurdles to its legitimacy
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Reviewed: Doctor Who's The Black Archive -- The Impossible Planet/ The Satan Pit
Reviewed: #DoctorWho's The Black Archive -- The Impossible Planet/ The Satan Pit
With Halloween just around the corner, it seems apt to revisit one of Doctor Who‘s scarier stories, via Obverse Books’ Black Archive series of monographs. Doctor Who has always treaded the line between science fact and science fantasy, but it wasn’t until 1971’s The Daemons that the show turned its attention to the mythical, the mystical, and the Occult. Introducing and rationalizing Wicca and…
Round One, Group Nine
Kate Orman vs Simon Bucher-Jones
Kate Orman
Simon Bucher-Jones
I'm looking for any comments on a draft first chapter...
The Book of Malcolm.
(A Tale of The Great Continent of Old Atlantis)
By
Simon Bucher-Jones
PROLOGUE
If you believe there are parallel Earths, strung in a never-ending loop of probability like shimmering pearls – and many people do, even some physicists, and you can’t stop them – you’ll know that the many Earths are divided by tiny, tiny, differences.
These start at the level of probability packets inside atoms, but eventually these add up and start being noticeable. You (and everyone else) actually live as an entity spread across a billion or so nigh identical universes – this is why you can never find your car keys.
Eventually things start really differing: thus, on this earth fridges are (mostly) white (for ‘cleanliness’), and the milk goes in the door, whereas on that the fridges are (mostly) blue (for the frost-goddess Zamzung) the milk is stored in a special spigot, comes from yaks, and the fridges are powered by treadmills[1].
There are worlds where things we think of as fantasy really took place, fantasy being no more improbable than most history, and a lot more probable than most modern politics.
There are worlds like ours where Atlantis may be just a myth, or a memory of the Minoans. There are worlds where it was real.
There are worlds where it may not sink: where the issue has yet to be decided. This particular world here – this blue and green bauble on the Great Chain of Possible Earths - is one of them. You know when you saw the film Titanic, the people in it weren’t worried by your knowing about its fate? Well, most of the population of this Atlantis aren’t even looking out for Icebergs, not yet anyway.
This story is a tale of the Great Continent of Old Atlantis, 78 noticeable difference worlds to the ectward side of ours: any similarity between them and us is entirely due to the intractable workings of human nature.
Chapter One
Over three hundred years later a scribe would[2] write…
THE BOOK OF MALCOLM.
We know of our own knowledge, and of that which was revealed to us, and from the accounts of those who saw and heard these things that Malcolm was just fifteen[3] the year The Last New God appeared and the prophesies of Lan began once again to come true in Atlantis.
Malcolm (Praise be to his name!) was a lowly shrine-tender in Bel-Thanor, the City of Bells, on this even the Ungodly Books of Patric, and Philiza agree. Accounts of his childhood exploits before this date, such as the Heathen tell, are not to the purpose of the those of the Way of Malcolm. Set such aside, my brethren.
We do not teach that he could understand the languages of birds and beasts, nor can it be considered historical that his birth was attended by omens. Such things are not impossible, but we do not know them to be true and it is not required of the Faithful that we should believe them. That he understood the languages of all the peoples of the world, is attested unto us. Let it be enough.
Deal with those who believe in such in the best ways, however, for they may still be brought to the truth. Refute most strongly though the claims of the heretic Talvanorists, that Malcolm was nothing more than an illiterate, a freeloader upon the charity of the good, abandoned by his parents. Let Talvanor’s dying recantation of his words remind us of the importance of revealed truth.
The Book of Malcolm
Letter to the Lemurians XII 1-4
(Orthodox Revised Edition, approx. 323 After Malcolm (AM.))
At the time of course, when Malcolm was a lad, things weren’t quite so…certain...
At the southern end of the Great Continent of Atlantis, around the wide mouth of the river Chan, in the last days of a boiling hot summer, the Festival of Godfall was taking place in Bel-Thanor, the City of Bells. The noise was considerable and the smell was deliciously indescribable, compounding as it did the cookery of a hundred lands, and nine schools of the culinary arts.[4] Atlantis called the peoples of the world to its shores to bear tribute, and to bring their cuisine.
The end of Godfall announcing the beginning of Autumn – would come in due time, just as it had succeeded in the calendar page-turning sense Fool’s Eve, and High and Low Harvest, which in turn followed the Feast of the Princes, which in turn followed Lan’s Fast, and Year’s Turn. Everything was bustling and splendid, and in its proper place. Storekeepers and merchants were already hard at work on the banners proclaiming that it was a mere 106 shopping days to next Year’s Turn. The shops were full despite everything being more expensive owing to extra-holiday pay and the prospect that customers might be a wee bit merry and unlikely to notice that a bowl of Godsfall Pudding was suddenly three times as much.
The festival this year however was somewhat marred on its next to last day, in the normal enjoying things and getting merry sense, by the sudden and unlooked for eruption of religion into the religious festival. Perhaps, ‘unlooked for’ isn’t quite right for the expectation of Godfall was the whole ‘true meaning’ of the annual feast days. Yes, the celestial omens only indicated a ‘likely’ Godfall every forty-fourth year, and in fact there had only ever been three, but it was rank heresy to doubt that a God could come to Earth. There was however, a large gap between not doubting there were, say, whales – and expecting to find one has swum up the river Chan and managed to fit into a gentleman’s bathing house on a specific Abzeusday. The God manifested, it had to be said, in an absolutely traditional way, as a trembling of the earth itself, a blinding flash of light from the heavens – the rending of the wall of a standing temple – and a sizzling globe of blue-green energy roughly ten yars across – sitting in a shallow crater in the central temple courtyard of Atlantis’s most religious city[5].
Three times before a Deity had been called down from the Heavens to Signify the Possible Fulfilment of the Prophesies of Lan. Each of these ‘New Gods’ had caused immense changes, brought Great Houses to ruin, exalted the lowly, changed for a time the laws of nature or the very meaning of good and evil, and shifted the positions of a number of mountains[6], but over thousands of years their power had waned at last, and Atlantis still stood as it always had, a shining jewel of a star shaped continent in the broad blue-green ocean. It would remain to be seen what a New God would do about that.
If you had interviewed (a process which would have been regarded as impertinent as the science and horror of broadcast journalism had yet to arrive in Atlantis) the average Atlantean man or woman, or eunuch, or thingstress, in the street, that Zenoclesday, concerning Atlantis – you would have discovered a broad agreedly set of nationalistic opinions, whose certainty was only weakened only by their almost complete lack of truth.
Atlantis, you would be told, was the terror of Lemuria and Hy-Brasil. It was the supreme republic. It was – the Atlanteans would have insisted - the spiritual heart of the earth. It somehow remained all these things even though it was presently; out-shipped numerically by Lemurian militant nationalism, tentatively allied with Hy-Brasil, again under the iron fist of an Emperor rather than an elected assembly, and without (until this morning) a recently potent God. Politics and national pride demanded it.
With the Godfall an accomplished fact, the standing of Atlantis itself was again cast like dice upon the boards of fate. For the fourth time since the martyrdom of the Prophet Lan by the Priests of Krakanoth, four thousand, four hundred and forty-four years before, the God-Power was in the ascendant, and the Priests would soon follow. The Festival itself, celebrated every year since Lan ‘s martyr’s death[7] was nearly over but its consequences lay scintillating and boiling in Temple Square, an as yet unformed God, awaiting the attentions and devotions that would caress it, shape it, and ultimately bind it to a specific Church. The last three Gods born: Amorphrodite, Zenocles, and Blanthro the Malicious (originally Blanthro the Good-Humoured) had come into existence in the same way; unlike the Gods who had existed since the dawn of the First Age of Humanity. The process was less random now in the Fifth Age, dependent not on the interaction between the fallen forces from the stars and small tribal groups, but on the actions of well-trained and professional God-crafters.
There was also the Great Hope, for while none of the other three New Gods had brought the Great Affirmation or the Great Calamity of the Prophecies in their respective Ages of Power - once again, all possible Power, or all potential Disaster was back on the religious and political agenda.
The citizens of Bel-Thanor decided on the whole to buy more wine and keep drinking.
This explains why as the bells kept ringing out, and apothecaries and minor magicians began the careful compounding of hangover cures, at least one of the three possible prophets of Lan (his status as yet unsuspected by any) was lying on his narrow bunk holding his head between his hands and groaning.
His name unsurprisingly for anyone knowledgeable in Atlantean history was Malcolm.
Three times before the prophesied Holy Power had manifested in the many templed City, and been claimed by the best prepared of the Priesthoods. Amorphrodite had brought new morals and new spice to the bedchambers of the mighty and the weak alike. Zenocles had brought the great age of the Quests of Self-Realisation, and no-one could contend that Blanthro, first hailed as the Kindly God of Humour before the horrifying nature of His Jests, had become apparent, had not wrought His own tremendous changes upon the face of the land.
Great Atlantis remained therefore a hodgepodge of competing religions and beliefs. To the relief of the surrounding island nations, it had not become a Country As Of Gods Upon The Humbled Earth, granted Eternal Status as Top World Power Divinely Affirmed Forever, but on the other hand – to the relief of those Atlanteans who knew about the dark side of the prophesies - the three blessed generations concerned had passed without the necessity for the mass manufacturing of waders, the building of immense boats, or the wholesale alteration of everyone by magic or miracle from air to water breathing, all of which things might well have been needed if the negative aspects of the Prophesies of Lan came to pass.
By the summer of the year Four Thousand, Four Hundred and Forty Four after Lan, the scrolls of Lan, and the prophesies they had contained were mostly forgotten in detail, even among the magical classes, where they existed only in the censored form left by the Krakanoth ‘Quizition, but on that first autumn morning - in the city of Bel-Thanor, there were still five hundred and three boys or men called Malcolm, one hundred and seven called Lataric or Patric, and seventy-two girls or women called Philiza or Phliza. According to the best contemporary scholarly reading of the Prophesy recorded in the Scrolls of Lan, Atlantis would stand inviolate – uninvaded, and supreme, until after Malcolm cut the golden knot, Patric found the key that worked both ways, and Philiza comforted (or possibly confronted) the beast that cries jewels, and if two of the tasks were accomplished in one generation, but not the third (reading in any order), Atlantis would last ‘Great Unto Eternity – Untouchable In Its Power, Supreme Ruler of The World’. Admittedly, according to the second-best reading – because of the difficulties of rendering Lan’s antique dialect into more modern Atlantean - it was also possible that Malcolm would ‘scissor his beard’, Patric would ‘split the world egg’ and Philiza would ‘suckle the giraffe’ – but those interpretations were considered heretical, if not meaningless, despite the support of the Barber’s Guild and the Old Atlantean Giraffe Breeders Association.
It was no longer the case that every family had at least one child bearing one of the Three Names, for the detailed reason for the custom had been lost, over the intervening thousands of years – but tradition kept them from dropping below a residual popularity. They were good, solid – non-showy – Atlantean names. They had none of the Bann Zimbian influence from the Southern Islands trade. They did not affect the lisp of Court manners, the sibilant ‘zz’ for ‘s’ that still hinted of the ages of the pre-human Dragon Gods, who had first taught humanity their letters and speech, in the days before The First Godfall.
No one except the Weavers would have reacted at being introduced to a Malcolm, a Patric or a Philiza, and a Weaver would have hidden their recognition. Like all those named in the Prophesies, the bearers of any of the three names were, without their knowledge – in most cases – under the gaze of a member of the Weavers Guild, if only to verify, and thereby discount, their continued uneventful and average existences, but the numbers concerned meant even the most worrisomely active could be given only the briefest scrutiny on the Looms of Fate on a normal day. A hundred journeymen and women to watch ten thousand children across a continent could not aspire to see every moment, only a sufficiency. The Weavers had magic, but they were not Gods – not yet. The majority of the Weaver’s attention fell where all three names could be found, which tended to be where tribes met, in the four great cities or at the solstice circles. They knew their Dread Duty handed down from the time of Lan Himself – in the hope of accomplishing the prophesies, the children must thrive, but should any two prophesies be accomplished, then the Order must decide whether to an attempt upon the third could be risked, or whether the children who bore the name of the third questor, be it Philiza, Patric, or Malcolm – must die, and quickly, and the name be taboo for a generation, lest Atlantis fall.
There was also, since the third ring of the Bells that morning, one New God, in Bel-Thanor which meant the Weavers were, perhaps, more alert than at any other time, in the last hundred and fifty years, and more focused upon that city. Even so, if every Weaver gazing at the City of Bells had been polled, they would have been unlikely to pick Malcolm of Rime as being in any way significant among his five hundred and two namesakes.
Malcolm Rime – to put his name in the common mode - had a headache. He had brought this on himself, partly by spending of the last of the small amount of money in the temple’s coffers for the month on temple wine (this was a financial headache), but mostly by drinking a lot of it (this was an immense hangover). The justness of the pain did nothing to dim the clamouring in his head. He was a slight, young man of fifteen and a bit (still, many would say - if they paid him any mind - a boy), with fair hair, and watery eyes the colour of osprey’s eggs. That wasn’t as attractive as he imagined it sounding: as osprey’s eggs were basically cream coloured with a hint of pink, and with brown blotches at one end. He always looked as if he was looking at something else out of the corner of his eye, even when he was looking straight at you. If he’d had a threepenny bit for all the times that the late Bishop Marak had told him (gently but insistently) to look the world straight in the eye, he’d have had eleven shillings and threepence. He had seen nine summers, and nine gruelling winters, before his family had ever come to the Temple City, and for the last six years he had toiled away at the Shrine, as the Bishop’s apprentice. Toiled was an overstatement. Perhaps pottered away was more accurate, for the kindly and unassuming Bishop Marak had been happy to provide shelter for the boy in return for tasks that amounted to light dusting, providing a sounding board for the priest’s thoughts about theology, and the occasional game of chaz. He had even been too good, or too vague a man to have demanded Malcolm’s virginity as many a dubious master might have of a serving lad. Chaz and wine had seemed to meet his needs for any sensual excitement. Malcolm had become quite good at the traditional Atlantean game played in a ceremonial bowl with a floating board in which as pieces of (each) side are ‘taken’ slightly heavier counter-weights are added until the board sinks. Victory consists of achieving a position of dominance that the other player concedes as being insurmountable without drowning all the pieces, whether red or grey. Marak had been in charge of the first Temple the family had come across and Malcolm’s father had taken the view that, short of Godfall, one religion was as good as the next for a boy of an age to be apprenticed. Malcolm’s mother Ellin, who had come from Sheeshay on the South coast, and had been raised as a follower of the Nine Singers, would in all probability have taken the fact that the first Temple they encountered was dedicated to them, as a sign that the Gods intended it as a suitable place for Malcolm’s working education, but for the fact that she had been dying and unable to give her surroundings any great attention.
One of Malcolm’s first duties at the shrine had been to help Marak prepare a shallow grave for his mother at the edge of the ceremonial pool of carp, in which grave, after the cleansing fire, her white bones were laid to rest. There were so few worshipers of the Nine Singers now that, in the years since, Malcolm had helped officiate at only five other funerals, and there had never been any need to dig a second pond for the graves to circle. The last official funeral had been that of Bishop Marak himself, a month after Fools’ Eve.
In the aftermath of that, of losing the man he regarded as a foster father, Malcolm had bought, and drunk, the wine.
It was now just after five bells, and the first brisk autumn dawn was beginning to break. Since the fourth bell of the morning had rung an hour before (each peal progressively louder to wake up the citizens still drowsy from the weekends’ festivals), the Theological news was already being mulled over in the kaffee shops along Smallhope Street, and proclaimers were already leaving the city, heading towards Melabeck Moor to the north on horse-back. It was considered an emergency, hence the horses. Proclaimers would traditionally walk, sometimes as far as ten thousand miles, the breadth of the Great Continent. An emergency was any event that might have effects that could overtake a walking man, if a news proclaimer tried to take word of an earthquake to somewhere where the houses had already fallen down, he’d be likely to be told it ‘just wasn’t news’, and be made to do some proper work like helping to pick things up. Those heading for the fishing settlements of Atlantis’s southern coast walked. Horses cost money, and the fishing villages weren’t important, even though the news itself was. A Tenth[8]God had come to Bel-Thanor of the Temples – a fine healthy manifestation. Now that the raw power of the event was over – the lightning and the rolling auroras passed - it was time for the prayers and the incense to rise and the white robes to be laundered and the chasubles to be decked with ophries. Mitres were being polished, and by some of the more militant cults – sharpened. Within a week, a fortnight at the most, one of the High Religions of Bel-Thanor would have persuaded the Raw Power to take up residence in its sanctum, and the blessings and the cornucopia would begin anew. The power, its God name and attributes known, would rise in its abundance.
For the ones failing to entice or entrap the nascent Deity, in all its ripe promise – there would be at best a gradual shedding of worshippers and a thin, cruel, period of doubt and repentance, until the joyous news of a merger with the Ascendancy, or at worst a forced acquisition and a dissolution. After the last three Godfalls, who spoke now of Xangrim of the Five Open Hands, or the Sisterhood of Melissandre? Only historians and professors of comparative religion, (and the black robed Weavers) not any one toiling at the God-face of the Living Word. Life was too short to worry about Defunct Gods who would invariably eventually resurface as demons, stories-to-frighten-children, or in the unluckiest cases, Travelling Lecturers about The Good Old Days. There was a living Deity in town!
It was not a time for anyone of a religious vocation to be shirking. Gods were, obviously all-knowing, and even the smallest mis-vocalisation of a psalm, or student grumbling at an ancient preceptor might tip the balance. From the greatest to the tiniest[9] of the seventeen surviving competitive religions of the Great Continent, rose a cry compounded of religious fervour, fearful self-doubt, and a strong conviction that they’d be damned if their congregation would blink first. It may be wondered how an – up to now - Nine God pantheon mustered seventeen religions. The answer is simple, eight of the seventeen were heresies, but no-one could quite agree which. The Sect of the Chanson of the Nine Singers for instance revered all Nine Gods as elements of one Sacred Song, which was the Universe. The Red Priests of Krakanoth, however, maintained that Their God was a God of Silent Stoicism and Does Not Sing. In an earlier age when the Nine Singers had more adherents, a brief accord was reached between the two religions when the Singers offered the suggestion that Krakanoth Might Be On The Drums, but this was now largely forgotten, as no one cared about the Nine Singers any more either to worship them or to condemn them as heresy.
The likely eventual effect on his job of the new Deity, was a contributory factor in driving Malcolm to the bottle. He hadn’t needed to be told the news. The innermost shrine in the Nine’s Temple, while tiny, had burned with the same supernal fire as all the others at the instant of Godfall, blue, soundless, and – to be honest – garishly ghastly, in its luminous insistence that something important was taking place. In that grim blue-grey light of not-day, getting drunker had seemed quite a sensible response. For Malcolm Rime, half-monk of the Chanson of the Nine Singers, the seventeenth and smallest sect, Godfall was an unwanted complication, and an end to what had been a comfortable if sparsely rewarded billet. So far as he knew, the sum total of the Clergy of the Nine Singers left in the city of Bel-Thanor was same as its total number of priests and priestesses in the wide world of the Atlantic Continent, and the same as the number of people sharing his bed: to whit one – that is to say him. The endowment that supported the order, left in other days by richer patrons and patronesses had dwindled to a point that would have been barely enough to maintain a Temple with a small congregation, but considered as a stipend for an individual who didn’t actually care if the Temple fell down or not, it was, while not lavish, adequate. It paid for his meals. It had bought the wine, it even allowed for a tiny amount of frivolous spending money a month. And if the meals had been herring and black bread, and the wine, meagre east-shore grape, he had no superiors to quibble about his performance and no inferiors to have to impress or order about. Bishop Marak’s death (in his bed one night, peacefully, of simple old age) – Nine Singers elevate his soul - had left Malcolm without anyone to grant him the status of a full-monk, or acknowledge that at fifteen years and six months he was an adult by Atlantean law. So, on the plus side his vows were half-taken, and he had enough to eat and a roof over his head, but on the negative, he disliked herrings (the cheapest foodstuff he could acquire – coming as it did, at minimal cost, from the few sea-coast villages where the Nine were still grudgingly acknowledged as worth offering to) and there was next to no chance that the Nine would survive the Glorious Outpouring of a new Golden Age. He would soon need to start all over again in a different regime of worship, or, while he was disinclined to the thought, have to seek some form of actual physical labour.
The religious crisis didn’t sort itself out in a week though, or a fortnight – after a month the great glistening mass of the God was still fizzing and glowing white and blue in the city square, surrounded by Temples, Churches and Chapels with open doors. Like a donkey between two equally enticing piles of hay – the God seemed likely to expire before it could decide where the sanctity was most concentrated. The initial excitement was getting sour, and the Priests were jittery and ill at ease. A God needed a Temple, everyone knew that, although no-one liked to talk about why.
There were watchers posted now at the high minarets and on the steeples and towers. Watchers who kept vigil by day and night, with cross-bows with ancient, enchanted, meteoric iron bolts for ammunition. Malcolm knew the secret that Bishop Marak had confided to him in his last illness. Gods needed churches like hermit
Crabs needed shells, and for the same reason.
Malcolm was sitting by his mother’s grave, and trying to wash the taste of breakfast (more herring, pickled) down with a cup of Kaffee (all the way from Hy-Brasil, and not an indulgence for every day, or even every week.) when the morning’s update of God related news reached him. He was good friends with Patric, the news-reader who shouted his cheery – and occasionally not so cheery – news out with the same rising inflection whether it was good or bad, and if he’d had any herring to spare, he’d happily have shared some with the lad. Malcolm called Patric ‘the lad’ in his head because although they were pretty much of an age, Patric was shorter with darker curly hair, and skin, and having lived all his life in and around Bell City, was also hardly the travelled man that Malcolm liked to imagine himself. But Malcolm kept that name and opinion firmly in his own head, because Patric despite his sunny temper had iron capped boots, and had been known to break a man’s ankle with one kick – news proclamation, and its gathering being at times a hack-shin business.
‘Someone’s smeared green paint, over the portico of the Temple of Hestra.’ Patric said, conversationally, which for him, was loud enough to scare a heron away from the carp, even from his position at the little temple’s gate. ‘The Hierophant has ten novices on scaffolding, scrubbing at it, and she’s sent a strongly worded letter to the Ecumenical Guard, demanding that Hestra’s fane be protected from vandals.’
‘Green paint?’ Malcolm said, vaguely scuffing his sandals in the dirt. Patric looked at them hard, and noted the tiny flecks of green where a careless or enthusiastic painter might have dribbled the leavings from their brush, particularly if working in the dark.
‘This time, yes Green. Of course, it was red when someone defaced the Three-fold statue of Amorphrodite. You’d been scrubbing your hands hard that day, with Lye soap I remember.’ Patric was considerably more worried by this older defilement than last nights. Amorphrodite the three Faced Goddess of Love was beneficial enough in her first two aspects of ‘The Initiatior of Congress’ or ‘The Exemplifier of The Grace of Matrimony’, but all quailed at her third form ‘The Dreadful Nullity to Be Fled from Lest Demons Smite Thee’. Although the scoff-graces sometimes mocked her as ‘Slag, Marry, A Void’, they were careful not to do so near her temple where the external intimate organs of some such taunters were still feeding sea-gulls on the black-iron spikes of Mansplainer’s Gate.
‘Really?’
‘Yes, really! Honestly Malcolm, what the Bells do you think you’re doing? If someone catches you; well it’s a serious thing. Not in normal times, you pay a fine or take a whipping. But there’s an unclaimed God in the City if you hadn’t heard, and if anyone finds you scuppering their chances of snaffling it, they’ll want your hide. Probably with an apology on it written in your blood with a pen made from your bones filled with ink from your eyeballs. If Bishop Marak had lived to give you the octopus-inked eyeballs of a full monk.’
‘Well, I’m sorry he died – but I’m not sorry he didn’t have to stick a hollow needle in my eyeballs and blow ink through it.’
‘Might have improved you.’
A friendly scuffle developed, during which both young men – still boys at heart - partly fell into the carp pool.
After honour was satisfied, Malcolm returned to the subject. ‘If it wasn’t these times, Hestra wouldn’t be paying me to deface Amorphrodite, and Krakanoth wouldn’t pay me to paint Hestra, and Amorphrodite wouldn’t stump up to break the stained glass in Hestra’s windows. I know it’s shoddy and self-serving, but this way they all stay free of primary sin and keep under the bat’s eye view for sanctity. Before the God chooses, I need enough money set aside to seek a new life. I’m tired of the Bells and the Gongs, and the shines and the singers, and besides...
‘Besides, you know Philiza may be leaving, and you’re going to traipse along after her without ever actually telling her how you feel?’
‘Possibly. High quality traipsing costs money, you know.’ Malcolm had not yet convinced himself either way. Philiza barely knew he existed, and while he could withdraw the remainder the Temple’s funds, to start anew – there being literally no one to stop him – he had not yet managed to firmly decide that he’d be right to do so.
Looked on one way it was stealing. Looked on another, it wasn’t harming a living soul. Vagueness and indecision had always been the main unique selling point of the Nine Singer’s Faith, and Malcolm’s religious education had in that respect not helped his natural diffidence at all!
He shifted on his stone seat, and sighed. He wished sometimes he was more like Patric. The news-crier – short muscular, curly-haired, dark of skin, grey-of-eye, gifted with the gab – was already more or less married, although to be sure, Malcolm wasn’t quite clear whether the eventual wedding would be with Sharlon the barmaid at the Scarlet Heron on Leminkan Street, or Martha who occasionally came into the city driving her ducks to market, or both. It could well be both, two of the present religions supported polyamory, (Amorphrodite’s priestesses considering it a positive virtue, and the Church of Hestria regarding it as very much up to the conscience of the individual Hestrian.) Whichever it was though Sharlon, or Martha or both, Patric certainly wasn’t painfully shy in the vicinity of women of any kind, and the ease with which he chatted to Philiza, when he and Malcolm had met her, suggested that he might even have actually kissed a girl. He’d not been struck into moons-eyes silence by Philiza’s raven locks, nicely up-turned nose, large brown eyes, and the glowing magician’s power-sign hovering over her head, casting its violet light down onto her dark velvet gown.
Malcolm had been. The magicians were intimidating as a class, and their quarter of the city was both fascinating and mysteriously creepy. There were various kinds of magic workers in Bel-Thanor, and he didn’t feel he had them all sorted out in his mind even after nine years of gawping. He’d worked out since that the sigil’s general shape had marked Philiza as an Artist Magician, but Malcolm didn’t know whether she was a musician, a painter, or a wordsmith. He had deducted since, from his memory of her slim unmarked hands that she was neither an etcher nor a sculptor, and the smithy arts were mainly mastered by men – for reasons of tradition or strength - but he could see nothing that would settle the matter beyond that. Some Artist Magicians carried a symbolic pencil or a brush behind one ear, or wore a brooch in silver of a tiny easel, open book, or a theatre mask, but she hadn’t. At least not where he’d been looking.
The Art-Magicians were the magician class the main religions generally tolerated in the Fifth Age – unlike those driven into exile centuries before - but even they were now packing up shops and houses that had stood for two or three generations and preparing to move away. Once a Church inherited the Fresh God-power, there would be no need for magicians in this corner of the world for several hundred years, maybe for an age. When all the power and truth was once again focused in one testament, who would need the wordsmiths? When the temple burned with glory and God-fire, who would need a painter? The images of the God would paint themselves in men’s minds, and woman’s hearts.
When magicians were not needed, the pogroms would not be long delayed. Things that did not serve the Churches or the Nobility, could not be allowed to exist in the possession of power. Everyone knew that. There were surprisingly few people left whose ancestors had not grasped that fact quickly enough, over the long history of the Imperial Continent.
Malcolm and Patric had been going through the Magicians’ quarter, a month before the Godfall, when Malcolm had first met Philiza. Malcolm had been on his way to see his father, an errand he’d been putting off, and Patric had been happy to come along, breezy as ever, one eye out for news to add to his rounds, one eye – engagement or not, on the pretty ladies and the well turned-out men. Keeping a weather eye on potential rivals, Malcolm supposed.
A magician – a painter – one who worked the science of turning men’s eyes this way or that, and could draw a crowd to stare at an image of a cat sketched on a wall for far longer than might seem reasonable[10], had once told him that men spent almost as long staring at men’s groins and those of animals, as they did at the eyes or other attractive characteristics of women. Malcolm was absolutely certain that could not be true. There were definitely far more attractive women in the city than there were lovely goats, and given that he himself was adequately handsome, by local standards, the men were no great shakes either. He assumed the painter’s remarks had been a form of spell: specifically a ‘saying’ that could not be tested in any way but which by being uttered made the utterer seem more intelligent and knowing.
He’d told Patric though, who’d laughed.
‘Paint-magics a load of old shit-splatters.’
Which of course had been just what you wanted your best friend to be saying when a gorgeous young female magician, bumps into you. Oh yes, lets insult her colleagues and be vulgar. Thank you Patric, whom I do not know.
Malcolm had felt himself blush, and known instantly that any attempt to say anything sensible would result in a stuttering mass of old nonsense. He found himself staring – however – into a pair of eyes and mysterious and violet as the flashing emblem above her head.
[1] But the yoghurt is excellent.
[2] Assuming the prophecies are correct, this can’t currently be guaranteed.
[3] Heretics say he was fifteen and six months, but we know what happens to heretics who don’t celebrate Malcolm’s Birth and Godfall at the same time in the year. So, take heed. Footnote to the Orthodox Revised Edition, Saint Esandor of Lemuria 323 AM.
[4] Including the Death Cooks of Mu-Han who regard the searingly lethal bloat-venom of the Snapping Oyster as ‘bland’.
[5] Next to the horrible domain of the Seven Necromancers sometimes called Bel-Shanak-Var, or the City of The Blood-Drenched Ones, of which more later if we really have to.
[6] Including Mount What-The-Hell-Is-That-Doing-Here?
[7] In his martyrdom, the Prophet Lan had been tied to a rack, and his joints burst asunder by the tightening of drying cords, but He had refused to worshipped the Demon Krakanoth, and He had not betrayed his followers to Krakanoth’s quisitors. After the passage of over four thousand years of gradual interpretation, re-interpretation, and disagreement, both Lan and Krakanoth were considered Gods, in the same pantheon, by Orthodox Atlantean believers and it could only be assumed that dinner parties among the deities involved now required carefully planning not to seat them next to each other.
[8] Tenth in the total Panthenon, Fourth of the New – post Lanic Gods.
[9] Almost, Malcolm had a headache.
[10] While this might not seem a very useful magic, painter-mages made a reasonable living drawing cats next to such slogans as GET YOUR FRUIT AND VEG HERE! THE CAT KNOWS IT’S FRESH! MEOW!
PROPOSAL BY SIMON BUCHER-JONES & [INSERT FAKE NAME HERE] HALLUCIGENIA (Alternative title: The Evolution of Monsters ) ...
HALLUCIGENIA
(Alternative title: The Evolution of Monsters)
A THIRD DOCTOR NOVEL OCCURRING AFTER THE SEA DEVILS
NOTE OTHER DOCTORS that could be used if the 3rd is over-subscribed: The 5th Just after Warrior’s Of The Deep, looking for that “other way”. Increased role for companions, split them – one with Doctor, two in zoo (to split later one with child/media people, other to mutate into 50ft beast – Tegan as the others are not of Earth stock). ATTACK OF THE 50FT AUSTRALIAN. (Is is an australopithicene Doctor? Turlough asked, ‘Well almost!’, the Doctor replied.)
The 8th A Modest Proposal - I understand that The Burning will leave open the question of whether the 8th Doctor could have had other “missing adventures” in Earth’s history before that novel begins; why not go the whole hog and give him one 40 million years before? At the end he could jury-rig a Siluirian sleep-capsule to take him forward to the date of the next chronological missing adventure! This would require re-ploting to merge the companion/Doctor experiences, but would still work. The Doctor could begin in the zoo….etc, etc, he could have a Silurian companion, and a human timescooped from “a hideous alternate Ape filled future” by Oolpas, and given to the cult as their Blind Ape Of Truth.
You've gotta love the Doctor going by Doctor Doctor and getting away with it.
A person is the sum of their memories. A Time Lord even more so. But some people live so long that there is no longer room for all the memories; they find themselves diminished, whittled away piece by piece… For many years, Doctor Who has implied that William Hartnell played the Doctor’s first incarnation — but in The Brain of Morbius, we were given glimpses of eight stern-faced men in assorted historical costumes — Doctors before the one we know as the first. What were they like, these forgotten Doctors? What worlds did they visit, and what adventures did they have there? Who were their companions, and who were their enemies? And perhaps just as interesting — what sort of stories would this forgotten prehistory of Doctor Who have told? ALL PROFITS FROM THE SINGLE PRINTING OF THIS BOOK WILL BE DONATED TO ALZHEIMER'S CHARITIES.
We're running short of copies of Forgotten Lives. It won't be reprinted, so if you wanted to grab a lovely paperback copy of this brilliant anthology of Morbius Doctor stories, with all profits going to dementia charities, now is the time to do it!