Dave's Anatomy: My History As a Writer, #68: "Horse Latitudes"

Horses have been companions to the human race for a thousand years. It's debatable who first tamed them, but from Japan and China to the edge of Europe, they were beasts of burden, vital to the economy and culture of everyone from the Mongols to the Knights of the Round Table. Spanish invaders brought horses to the new world; some got away, went wild, and the native tribes learned to ride them and use them as a decisive weapon against their enemies, both European and native. It has only been about a hundred years since horses faded from the scene, replaced by mechanized vehicles.

In the tale "Horse Latitudes," Sossity Chandler is on a cruise with her boyfriend. She enjoys the relative anonymity; though a lot of people on the cruise know who she is, and though she has agreed to do a short concert beyond the voyage ends, the people on board generally respect her privacy and she is able to relax and enjoy herself.

Horses painted by Chirico

But she is also getting visions of horses. And the horses are not particularly friendly. As C. S. Lewis wrote in a poem about two horses of the future, "the look / Of half-indignant melancholy and delicate alarm’s gone." These horses, and the ones Sossity sees, are rather ferocious and dangerous. And, of course, wild horses are dangerous and formidable. Sossity sees one in the water beside the boat and in her dreams. More disturbingly, one night she dreams she is adrift at sea and horses are trying to kill her by dragging her down into the sea; she is rescued, though only after much mayhem, death, and horror.

Hobnobbing with other passengers, she learns, from a Professor of Spanish literature, that they are in the "horse latitudes," and near a place called "Horse Island." The Horse Latitudes were located in parts of oceans where ships were often becalmed. Legend had it that ships transporting horses to the new world sometimes had to throw them into the water to drown because they were stalled and running out of food and water for the horses. Scholars today say that this was probably an "urban legend" of the time and did not really happen. Still, paranormal stories allow one to push the limits. Sossity learns that Almagro, the Captain of the ship, comes from a Spanish family that raised and transported horses in 1600s—and is still in the horse-raising business today.

The most frightening incident happens when Sossity goes out one night to smoke some joints with other passengers. Making her way back to his cabin, she is cornered by three large horses that surround her. They are soaking wet and seem to study her with their big, serious eyes. After a few moments, they disappear. She thinks the whole thing a drug-induced hallucination, but the next day, Almagro has his crew cleaning up a pool of salt water that has somehow appeared on the deck of the ship. Sossity also learns that one of Almagro's relatives came to Horse Island a short time ago and ended up dying of anthrax.

Once on Horse Island, she is able to forget her fears. She enjoys the luxury hotel and amenities of the island. Seeing the herd of wild horses (and is a little unnerved to see three beasts who like the horses who cornered her on the boat), she goes running with other cruise passengers, and has a good time. She sees Almagro uses a taser on a horse that is trying to menace him. She talks to him and learns more of his disgust for horses and for his family's horse-raising.

One morning she goes for a run with a group of women staying at the hotel. When she returns, she founds the horses have attacked.

Mayhem has broken out. The horses have come into the hotel, chased people across the grounds, and, in some cases, trampled and stomped people. She thinks of Diggory, her boyfriend, and runs toward the hotel. After a while she finds him safe, protected by police with rifles. Meanwhile, Almagro has learned of the incident and given his crew instructions to kill all the horses. He and his girlfriend appear in a jeep, but before they get to the hotel, horses descend on and kill them. Sossity is near-by. The three horses she saw on the ship gather around her, as they did the night she first saw them—not to harm her but to protect her. When Almagro is dead, the horses—including the ones guarding Sossity so she will not be harmed—depart for sanctuaries in the hills. They have had their revenge and the anger of their memories can rest.

Almagro and his girlfriend are dead. A few tourists have been hurt, none seriously. Eight horses were killed. The Police Chief countermands Almagro's order and says the horses are not to be harmed. They are too valuable as tourist attractions to be destroyed.

"Horse Latitudes" appeared in a print magazine called Brain Soup, which only went for one issue. I don't believe it is available today. Another story to resubmit.

For additional comments, check out my Writer's Page.

I would love to hear your comments. Some people are afraid of horses. I never was, though I have not been around them a lot and have hardly ridden. Some people, though, find them frightening.

Happy reading.

Dave's Anatomy: My History As A Writer #67: "Dead Man's Dump."

War is something the human race does that has built-in element of horror.  And horrific as all wars are, some stand out as particular gruesome. World War I is such an example.  Here you had armies fighting with modern weapons but still using old-style battle tactics. Men moved out in ranks against high-powered rifles and artillery. Cavalry charged machine-gun emplacements. Flame-throwers, poison gas, trench warfare, and the massive slaughter of men (plus civilians, men, women, and children) single World War I out s particularly horrific and ghastly.

Poet Isaac Rosenberg

The story, "Dead Man's Dump," came from a poem by Isaac Rosenberg. Rosenberg was one of the many talented poets who died in World War I, and the poetry he left behind is some of the best poetry from that conflict and some of the hardest to read--not because it is poorly written but because the subject matter is so difficult to encounter.

A "dead man's dump" is a place where the bodies of those killed at the front lines and taken and laid out to await transportation further behind lines, identification, and burial. In this particular story, the dead will save the living.

World War I is drawing to an end. The narrator of the story, a platoon sergeant, is thinks his unit will be home for Thanksgiving. His friend, a lower-ranking sergeant does not agree. He sees a German attack brewing. The Germans are in a bad way, have been stopped in their last advance and suffered several heavy defeats at the hands of the allied forces. The narrator's unit, in fact, recently repulsed an attack, though the cost of repulsing it was heavy, with many in their unit killed.

As the days pass, the certainty of an attack builds. The Germans bring in fresh troops and new artillery pieces.  Surveillance aircraft and observers who manage to get close to the German lines say the same thing. The Germans are preparing for another attack even though their army has lost support at home and its hierarchy is negotiating a peace treaty.

Discouraged by what he has heard, the narrator of the story remembers going through a dead man's dump. Normally, troops did not go through such areas for the sake of morale, but a greenhorn lieutenant had mistakenly led his until between ranks of corpses, some recently killed, some recovered later, all laid out in evens ranks. Soldiers on burial details (who were usually African-American soldiers in World War I) were loading them into ambulances and trucks for transport and burial.  The Lieutenant is reprimanded for his action, but the incident has its demoralizing effect. The narrator and the other troops saw several dead from their unit among the laid-out copses. The narrator has to admit that the German forces they are facing will attack again and all of them will be in the dead man's dump.

Soldiers with flowers in their rifles

That night, flares go off on the German side. This puzzles them. Attackers do not light flares; those who are under attack to do they can see the advancing enemy.  They puzzle:  is someone attacking the Germans? They wonder if a British, French, or another American unit may have attacked them. Their commander has not been told of any plans for another unit to attack the Germans. The battle is ferocious. They can see troop movement in the flashes of gunfire and in explosions. They hold their position, at high alert, ready for an attack.

The attack does not come. In the morning, they are bone weary. The noise of combat has died down and the German position they face is quiet. Soon a British officer shows up and says he has good news for them:  the war is over. The Germans have surrendered. Hostilities have ceased.

Despite the news, the men stay huddled in the trenches. No one wants to be shot by a straggler who has not heard of the surrender. After a while, some of the stretcher-bearers come to the camp to ask what has happened to the bodies in the staging area—in the dead man's dump. They had all disappeared.

The narrator knows what has happened. He says he is going to the German lines. When he and a few others arrive there, the Germans are gone. They have abandoned their position. He and the soldiers with him find the bodies of many friends who had died in the last engagement and whose corpses they had seen at the dead man's dump. They had not wanted their friends to die the day before the war ended. They came to fight just one last time.

The story appeared in Absent Willow Review, a journal that no longer publishes and, unfortunately, does not keep an archive.

For more titles, check out my Writer's Page.

For the tale of a Japanese warrior Princess best not antagonized, read The Sorceress of Time.  Princess Jing Lin is facing challenges. The key to the future lies in the past.

I would love to hear your comments

Dave's Anatomy: My History As a Writer, #66: "The Ghost-Doll of Valerian."

I don't like to write about politics. I don't write often about social issues. I think such matters are compelling only when they are framed as moral issues. William Dean Howells' famous story "Editha" is an open attack on jingoistic patriotism; and while that is something that certainly deserves to be critiqued, the  head-on, confrontational manner in which Howells frames the story and goes about criticizing the idea that war is glorious and romantic makes the tale gauche and propagandistic. Contrast this to Hemingway's A Farewell To Arms, which contains no overt criticism but is the most effective critique of war I have read because of the way it illustrates the moral chaos, stupidity, brutality, and waste of war. The same could be said of Winfred Owen's "Dulce Et Decorum." It is not a shrill denunciation of attitudes on armed conflict, but a memoir showing the horror of war and the glibness those who would romanticize it. 

The dramatic techniques used by Hemingway and Owen reflect my approach. You don't have to sing "War, what is it good for?" to point out the moral wound war creates. The same is true with other issues, and in my story "The Ghost-Doll of Valerian," I pointed out the crimes of tyrannical, intolerant government, religious persecution, and dogma. Rather than engaging in denunciations, as Howells did through the speeches of his characters in "Editha," I chose to point out how tyranny violates and destroys the very things that make us human and the things we most cherish.

Vahid Dabushi is a member of the Revolutionary Council of an un-named Middle  Eastern country (which is a lot like Iran). He presides over the trial of a Bahá'í woman. Bahá'í is a religion that grew up in the Middle East in the 1800s. A monotheist faith, it emphasizes the transformation of the human race and that God uses various human messengers to direct people toward moral improvement. The religion is non-violent and apolitical. But it has been severely persecuted, especially in Middle East. The Bahá'í woman in Vahid's courtroom has been accused of heresy. She is given the option to convert from her faith, but she refuses. Vahid sentences her to hang.

Valerian uses as a stepping stone

As he waits for the execution, he reflects on the odd events that have occurred on his estate the last week. Servants claim to have seen a naked man about the premises. His appearance is odd, they say; he looks puffy, like a stuffed doll, or a puppet, and only appears at night. Vahid, who claims descent from ancient pre-Islamic kings, wonders if it's a joke some of his more mean-spirited friends might be playing on him. It was Shapur, a pre-Islamic ruler of Persia, and of whom Vahid says he is a descendant, who captured the Roman Emperor Valerian. Legend had it that Shapur used him as a stepping stone to mount his horse and that, eventually, he had Valerian skinned alive and had his body stuffed by taxidermists and put on display in a pagan temple. Legend also had it that women would take their daughters, just before their wedding night, to see the doll of Valerian and get an anatomy lesson on the male body.

Bahá'í Temple, Chicago

The story, he knows, was apocryphal—anti-Christian propaganda aimed at the Zoroastrian Persians. And he has other worries to occupy his mind. He is concerned with his daughter, who has gone to school in England, returned, and is full of new ideas. He warns her that she must not be too vocal and keep her beliefs to herself. He has also learned, from a physician who conducted a physical on the young woman recently, that she is not a virgin—a thing she acknowledges. He warns her to be quiet and says he will arrange for an operation to, as he puts it, "repair" her (reconstruct her hymeneal tissue—a procedure done in some Middle Eastern countries where it is vital that a bride be a virgin). She also chides him for condemning the Bahá'í woman to death. After an angry debate on the manner of her behavior, she says she has seen the naked figured as well. He appeared to her the other night, she said, bare and wearing a rope around his waist.

Vahid is skeptical—then he himself receives as visitation from the ghost-doll:  Immediately he knew it was the Emperor Valerian. His face, with sharp Roman nose, blue eyes painted on glistening pearl plates, short hair framing a puffy head, gazed blindly in Vahid’s direction. He shrank back, his voice making a strangled, squealing sound.  He saw the misshapen legs, the arms like long loaves of soft bread, fingers like stuffed grape leaves. Its feet, flattened on the bottom, looked like pita rounds. Its member dangled obscenely where the legs met. No rope around his waist, he thought, remembering even through his terror what his daughter had told him. After the specter departs, he rushes to his daughter's bedroom to find she has hanged herself.

He reads her suicide note:  Father, please do not let mother see me. The Bahá'í woman—I had to exchange my life for hers. The ghost-doll of Valerian gave me the rope. I am so very sorry, but it was the only thing left for me to do. As Vahid sinks to his knees and gives vent to his grief, he hears the soft, swishing, paddling sound as the ghost-doll of Valerian goes out into the night.  

Tyranny and intolerance have innumerable negative effects. But the most serious is that it makes us less human. Ideology squeezes out love and affection. Dogmatism—whether it is religious, political, or both—interferes with relationships. The atrocities of the past (Valerian's supposed torture and mutilation) return to haunt us; so do atrocities that are more recent and more immediate. 

"The Ghost-Doll of Valerian" appeared in a journal called Orion's Child, now defunct. I can't find an archive for it. Once more, I see a story that perhaps needs to be resubmitted somewhere.

For fantasy reading, get a copy of my full-length novel,

The Sorceress of the Northern Seas. Lybecca of Dunwood seems like an average village girl growing up in Celtic/Roman Britain. Soon, however, it becomes apparent that she is not typical, that she is a conduit for magical powers, and that eventually she will become the most powerful sorceress in the realm of Britain--The Sorceress of the Northern Seas. Purchase a copy here.

For additional titles, see my Writer's Page.

I would love to hear your comments and remarks.

Dave's Anatomy: My History As a Writer #65, "Sita's Strategy"

Steampunk City concept

Steampunk emerged as a genre a few years back. Once I understood what it was, I tried my hand at writing it. Steampunk uses contraptions and devices from the Victorian era: steamships, dirigibles, early submarines, and other such devices. In fact, as with Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, it employs the fantastical and the scientific, combining them to create submarines like the Nautilus or the airship in Master of the World. My story, "Sita's Strategy," takes this idea a quite a bit further. Sita comes up with a much more sophisticated and destructive weapon—one that outstrips a submarine or an airship by light years.

Sita

I decided to bring some racial diversity into the genre, probably because I saw a call for papers that wanted steampunk with an African or Asian setting rather than the traditional European setting and Victorian time frame. The story does take place during the Victorian era, and in England, but I created the character Sita, who is Indian. By adding this character I was able to illustrate some of the challenges Indians living in England during the late 1800s might face.

Sita is a young woman who is half-caste (the term used back then), with an Indian mother and a British father. She has grown up in England and played the convert to British culture, but of late, as a married woman with a British husband, she has tried to identify more with her Indian roots, wears a sari, and does not affect British fashion or manners. Furthermore, she has studied physics at Cambridge and has the ability to transform her theories into mechanisms. The British government relies on her as a technical engineer who can produce superior weapons.

She demonstrates her abilities by defeating a massive Spanish invasion of England (a sort of second armada). One of the fun things about writing Steampunk is that you can alter history and politics to suit the world you are creating. In Sita's world, Spain is a massive empire that encompasses the Iberian peninsula and all of South America. The Spanish assemble a huge fleet of ships to invade England. England has airships, but not enough to stop the attack. Sita is able to transform production techniques so that England produces huge numbers of airships and is able to completely destroy the Spanish fleet. She is a hero but also feels remorse that she has caused so much death and destruction using her technological abilities.

Britain is once again facing an invasion, this time by Serbia, a nation that includes all of Russia and Eastern Europe. The Caliphate of Cordoba has allied with them, so that North Africa and much of the Middle East is in the alliance. Britain's usual allies—France, Germany, Italy, and the Lutheran Federation in Scandinavia—have declared neutrality. America is undecided. The Kingdom of Prester John—a vast Eastern Christian land that includes much of Africa and Central Asia—is not convinced it should come to Britain's defense.

Queen Victoria is meeting with Sita to discuss a weapon that will even the score. She trembles to think of using it and remembers how she developed the idea: Sita had long known energy is matter and matter energy. This was a startling concept in Britain these days, but the sages of China and her own homeland had known it for thousands of years. They had not, however, she reflected bitterly, used this knowledge to produce a weapon. She has worked with radium, studied Marie Curie's work, and knows that some elements are unstable and seem to bleed their energy out. The idea occurs to her that the massive energy of matter might be released. When a French scientist sends her mineral samples from Gabon in French Equatorial Africa, she is convinced she can release the energy in the material. Sita and a group of military leaders set off the world's first nuclear bomb in a remote section of the South Atlantic. The military men are delighted; Sita is appalled that she has invented such a destructive device.

She knows the Queen will want her to use the weapon she has developed against the armies and cities of Serbia and Cordoba. In despair, she goes to see Wu Li, a Chinese philosopher she knew from Cambridge and asks his counsel. He reminds her that the ancients taught that the skillful warrior wins without fighting and defeats the enemy by ruining alliances, cutting supply lines, discouraging and demoralizing soldiers. Sita is confident she can do this and will persuade the Queen to follow a different course than direct attack. Wearing her sari, she leaves for her meeting confident the horrific weapon developed under her supervision will not be used.

"Sita's Strategy" appeared in the September 2011 issue of The Wi-Files. You can read it here.

For more of my books, check out my Writer's Page.

Lybecca of Dunwood

This month I'm promoting my book The Sorceress of the Northern Seas. Lybecca, a village girl, becomes the most powerful witch in England. It's a long, hard road, but she is capable of walking it. Book One chronicles her rise through opposition to acquire massive power.

I would love to hear your comments and perspectives.