Vale Aida

Author of the Magpie Ballads. New novel Hostis out now! x goodreads x twitter

[valeaida]

On Thursday 14 April, 2022, Hostis will be available from Amazon** in paperback and ebook! Hannibal ad portas, and I’m excited to share him with all of you ❤

** also from most other online retailers within the next couple weeks or so!

[valeaida]

It’s alive, lads! Now available HERE! Go get yourself a spicy enemy today <3

[enemyofrome]

What’s your opinion on generative ai in creative spaces? I’ve been seeing an uptick and was curious what you might think as an author

I spent eight years working on The Magpie Ballads and five on Hostis. That time wasn't just spent putting words into sentences (which a computer could do); it also involved thinking deeply about my characters and their arcs and relationships, and falling in love with the places I wrote about — some painstakingly researched, others even more painstakingly made up. I don't believe there's a substitute for originality and passion.

There's a lot more that could be said (and has already been said by more articulate people) on the subject, but suffice it to say that I've never used generative AI in my work and never will.

[moonlady101]

"You want to know something even worse?"

"Dear gods, no," said Mago ; then "What?"

"Probably half of them are called Gaius."

I have no words for the book I just finished. A couple of years ago I made a post about finding a fanfic (one of the best written I have read) about Hannibal and Scipio after the Punic Wars; well, turns out the author wrote a book about them too. It's called Hostis, and the author is @enemyofrome. Not only the writting is very good, not only is the setting absolutely evocative, but the story is brilliant... what if Scipio hadn't gone to Spain with his father? What if he had been in Cannas and gotten captured by Hannibal? On top of all that, the protagonists aren't portrayed as heroes,they are so very human, Scipio calls his mother mama because he is only 18, Hannibal jokes with his siblings and they all hate Cato (seriously it's so funny to me that Cato is cabbage boy).

It has been a while since I enjoyed a historical novel so much. Go read Vale Aida's book and her fanfic on ao3. I promise it's worth it.

[valeaida]

Hello, where can we find your books (ebook and physical) that isn't amazon?

I believe Elegy & Swansong are available on the Barnes & Noble website, and sometimes they're also on sale at BetterWorldBooks!

In the spirit of full disclosure though, all three of my books are distributed via the Kindle Direct self-publishing platform, so unfortunately Amazon does get a cut of the sales even if you purchase the books from a different retailer -- something to keep in mind if you're not comfortable with giving them money.

[valeaida]

Ahhhhhh!!! I just finished Hostis and had to come find you to say so. Delightful!!!! I can't wait to spend more time with Hannibal (and ship the hell out of him and Scipio) Thank you for a marvelous, entertaining, sassy story!

Thank you! Messages like these make my day! <3

[valeaida]

hi i just read hostis in like two sittings . i didnt have a plan going into this message im so sorry . i liked your book it was very good

that made my entire day, thank you <3

[valeaida]

HELLO LADS you can now preview the first chapter-ish of Swansong (2nd ed.) for free here! Download! Read! Reborb for a dumb borb! 

PSA again that the new edition (ft. new cover/illustrations and updated text) will be out in ebook and paperback on July 30, 2019 ❤️

Thanks all! Don’t forget to follow my twitter @valeaidawrites and my personal tumblr @enemyofrome for, uhh, sporadic updates on my new Punic War novel!

[valeaida]

If you recently tried to access the Google Drive link for the Swansong excerpt and found that it wasn’t working, try again -- I’ve fixed it <3

[valeaida]

On Thursday 14 April, 2022, Hostis will be available from Amazon** in paperback and ebook! Hannibal ad portas, and I’m excited to share him with all of you ❤

** also from most other online retailers within the next couple weeks or so!

[valeaida]

Hostis cover! It’s almost here! :D

[valeaida]

snippet from Hostis!

from Chapter II, The Man on the Elephant, in which the Carthaginian army crosses a marsh, and Hannibal has a very bad day.

(Release date for the novel to be announced very shortly! Watch this space!)

The second day in the Arno marshes, Sosylos said, “Your brother is very ill.”

Mago was not in the mood to worry about Hannibal’s sore head. He had just seen two of his grooms drown in mud, scarcely five yards from where he had been sitting to eat his morning bread. One of them had fallen asleep by the roadside, and begun sinking into ground that had looked perfectly solid a moment before. The other had thrown him a rope and tried to pull him out, only to tumble in himself. They thrashed for what felt like hours, submerged to the waist, then the chest, then the chin, and then disappeared altogether into the quagmire, with Mago still watching, and wishing he was not.

“He’s fine,” he said. “He says he’s fine.”

“He won’t let me look at his eye,” said Sosylos.

“I just saw him. Cantered up front to see if the guide was still alive.”

Hannibal had put Mago in the vanguard with the cavalry, where the horses would not be hindered by slow-moving men on foot. Behind them were the infantry and the baggage train, the wagons getting their wheels stuck every few paces; then the camp followers, the soldiers’ wives and whores and cooks and soothsayers that trailed an army in the thousands wherever it went. Sosylos’s salt-and-pepper brows went up. “When was that?” 

“Just now,” said Mago. “This morning. Might have been last night.”

They had gone on long past sundown, eating as they went, since there was no solid ground even to stop and rest. Mago dozed a few hours in the saddle, then dismounted to let some exhausted infantryman have a turn on his horse, and went to trudge on foot with the Iberians in the middle of the column. At some point the sun had come up again, daylight filtering through the foliage to cast spiderweb shadows on the murky face of the river. Time had grown strange and dilated, as it did when one stopped sleeping.

“I had to make him sit down,” said Sosylos. “He nearly rode into a tree.”

“Maybe he thought it was a Roman.”

The old Greek’s mouth thinned into a flat line. “Did you march all the way to Italy to crack jokes? Are you a general or a child?”

The frown was a familiar one. So had Sosylos frowned when Arishat concussed herself climbing something she shouldn’t, or Hannibal got so caught up in a book he forgot to eat. When Hasdrubal showed up to lessons with his eyes kohled and his chiton reeking of jasmine. When Mago, it seemed, did anything at all. “All right,” he said. “All right. I’ll see if I can whack some sense into him. Where’s he gone?”

His feet were stuck in the mud again. This time it was his right sandal that got left behind. He hobbled after Sosylos to the rear of the column, swatting aside branches, stepping over mudpools and ankle-breaking roots. The ground was much softer after twenty thousand sets of feet and hooves had passed, and in some places the rearguard had to wade through mud up to their knees. They passed a heap of corpses, and then another, and another: cairns of limbs and hair and sagging mouths that served as makeshift ledges for the sick and weak to lie down and sleep above water, until the swamp claimed them too, and so the piles grew.

Hannibal was sitting on an overturned wagon near the very end of the column, screened from view by Surus’s enormous grey rump. The mahouts had clearly done some quick thinking. If the troops heard that their rab was ill, even the strongest of them would give up and go home. “Can’t he ride?” asked Mago.

“I can,” said Hannibal.

“He can’t,” said Sosylos.

Surus gave a solicitous swoosh, his trunk dripping slimy pulp from a melon the mahouts had been feeding him. Hannibal looked worse than ever. His eyelid was a mottled burgundy-red, uglier than any bruise you could get from sparring or practising pankration or putting eel sauce in Hasdrubal’s hair, and the raised inflammation was creeping down his cheek like a wine-stain. Mago tried not to look at it. “He got us over the Alps. He can get on his horse.”

“That’s what he wants you to think,” said Sosylos.

“I,” said Hannibal, “am right here.”

His sweat-limp curls were plastered to his forehead, his good eye glazed and unfocused. “The swamp air’s going to his head,” said Sosylos. “It’s bad for the infection.”

Mago scrubbed a hand over his face. “All right. You’re getting on Surus. Can you stand?”

“I most certainly can,” said Hannibal.

“He can’t,” said Sosylos.

“And I am not about to”—Hannibal made sweeping, thought-gathering motions—“ride an elephant while my men slog on foot.”

“You’re not riding,” said Mago. “We’re tying you to a litter and tying the litter to Surus.”

Surus honked again, slopping pulp down the back of Mago’s tunic. Hannibal fixed them with an asymmetrical glare. “I can stand.”

He did so, quite admirably, for the span of a breath. Mago reached to steady him, found himself supporting Hannibal’s whole weight, and nearly staggered into the river. The overturned wagon gave a sad gloop and submerged itself entirely.

“I can stand,” said Hannibal, his arm around Mago’s neck. Under the sticky sheen of sweat, his skin was blazing hot. “I’m standing.”

“Sure you are,” said Sosylos. “Now get on your elephant and let me do something about your eye.”

Mago flailed, recovering his balance. “Like what? I’d sooner push him in the Arno. I’ll write to Rome, all, we dropped our general in your swamp, war’s cancelled now, so long, hope you enjoyed.”

Sosylos kneaded the bridge of his nose. “I wish,” he said, “I could drop all four of you in a swamp.”

The slaves hauled up a litter. Getting Hannibal to lie down was another ordeal altogether: Mago sort of tipped him onto the litter, and recited Homer to distract him while Sosylos strapped him down. Sing O Muse of the wrath of Achilles, who was sick of Troy, and wanted to go home and take a dump in his own sweet shitter. Shut up. That’s not how it goes. Even delirious with fever, Hannibal guarded his poetry as if all the hordes of Rome were trying to take it from him.

“He’ll have to have the eye out,” said Sosylos in an undertone, as the mahouts got Hannibal secured on Surus’s back.

“What?” said Mago. “Rubbish, can’t you save it?”

“You know I can’t. Look at him.”

Hannibal had subsided to a muttering delirium on his litter, probably in Homeric Greek. Mago had acquired six new mosquito bites, and even the rearguard had long passed them by. “Can’t do it in this damn swamp, anyway,” said Sosylos. “I’ll keep him quiet. You better take charge and get us out of here while there’s still anyone left alive.”

“Me?”

The Spartan’s gaze was part exasperated, part pitying, all tender. “If he dies, who’s going to end up commanding this mob? There’s only one other son of Hamilcar Barca I see here.”

Mago heard all this, but only registered the first bit. The sun was climbing the sky, the spring rains had burst the Arno’s banks, and in his stomach everything had gone cold, cold, cold. “If he dies.”

“If,” said Sosylos.

He clapped Mago on the back. “It won’t come to that. Ba’al is good. Now get a move on.”

[valeaida]

Final proofread in progress! ☀

[enemyofrome]

nicknames that mago has called people in hostis:

creampuff

cheesecurd

cow man

horse boy

you absolute raisin

you utter toe

[enemyofrome]

a nonexhaustive list of dumb things hasdrubal “hasdrubutt” barca did during the second punic war

(other than yeeting himself directly into a Roman cohort, which we don’t talk about here)

– yelled at a bunch of naval captains for panicking and running away, so they panicked and ran away (Livy 23.26)

– nearly pulled off a Cannae (double envelopment and all) of his own at the Battle of Dertosa, except his troops lost on purpose because they didn’t want to cross the Alps (Livy 23.29)

– sent a really passive-aggressive letter to Carthage when they ordered him to join Hannibal in Italy (Livy 23.27)

“lmao sure :) but you know all our Spanish allies revolted and joined the Romans as soon as they heard I was leaving, right? :) I mean sure, I’ll go help my stupid brother, I just hope you have a huge army to replace ME when I’m GONE :)))”

– I don’t have the source for this rn but Silius Italicus has him partying and cosplaying as Dido while Scipio was storming New Carthage, and that’s my single favourite piece of characterisation in historical fic ever

– had a 137lb shield of solid silver with his own fucking face on it (Livy 25.39)

– got penned in by Roman troops at a place called Black Rocks one time, so he sent heralds to the enemy commander and pretended to surrender

and then just. talked at the Romans for days while his troops slipped away by night

“… That day was consumed with inordinately long discussions, and the (intentional) documentation of irrelevancies… So it was that several days were spent on an open discussion of terms, and several nights on a clandestine evacuation of Carthaginians from the camp.” (Livy 26.17)

then he waited for a misty day, and then told the Romans he had religious obligations and couldn’t come over (at this point they still hadn’t realised that most of his army had escaped) and noped the fuck out of there

his entire army was saved

wtf even is this scheherazade magic. big bro could NEVER

– won a battle one time by sending off all his best troops to his baby brother Mago and then, outnumbered and surrounded, paying the Romans’ Celtiberian mercenaries to go away (Livy 25.32-36)

“no, no, I’m not paying you to fight for ME, that would be dishonourable, wouldn’t it? I’m just paying you to do nothing. Literally. Take this money and go home.”

“This did not strike the Celtiberians as a serious transgression on their part. It was not a question of turning their weapons on the Romans, and they were being given remuneration large enough for fighting a war for not fighting one.” (25.33)

[valeaida]

things that influence hasdrubutt's characterisation in hostis :')

[enemyofrome]

Scipio: hot or not?

i’m gonna go with “more cute than hot, but definitely pleasing to look at” 👀

[enemyofrome]

Where/What is your degree in? I'd love to do a degree that lets me write stuff and study history at the same time!

My degree was in creative writing, so definitely not a ~real~ historian in any shape or form -- it’s just that my superpower is making every single assignment (whether creative or research-based) about the hannibabe, so 👀

[enemyofrome]

When will Hostis be available?

Hello anon! I don’t have anything close to a release date for Hostis yet (it’s still in the editing phases), but I have an entire year to do nothing but work on it, and I promise I’m doing everything I can to get it out as soon as possible! (I also promise that, when it does come out, it’ll be worth the wait.)

[enemyofrome]

trying to write a summary of hostis like:

hannibabe sexy. scip confuse. SCIP BOING! hannibabe hearteye.