I don’t know if I ever mentioned this, but I wrote a book about Pasiphaë, taking apart the nasty Greek myth and putting it back together in a plausible historical context. Legend Press are publishing it next February, and it’s currently on promotional pre-order at Waterstones. Offer runs until the 19th, so anyone in the UK who’s tempted, you have another 24 hours.
I haven’t been keeping up with this blog lately. Too many other commitments that eat away at my time. I have missed two weeks of the Oracle’s advice and will remedy that as soon as I get a minute.
In the meantime, this is an excerpt from The Darkest Tide, introducing one of my favourite (despite appearances) characters, Arawn, the misbegotten High King.
If the excerpt intrigues, you can get hold of the book on Amazon. I won’t put in the links but just look for The Darkest Tide, Book I of the Ys trilogy.
By popular request, this is the UK Amazon link
and the Amazon.com link
Arawn stood in the shadows of the bedchamber listening to the laboured breathing of his son. Aeron was eighteen years of age, his father’s unopposed successor as High King, and Arawn knew, as surely as he knew that the sun set in the west, that his son was dying. Healers bustled about his bed, laying poultices of herbs on the blackened flesh, making healing spells, thickening the air with the slow combustion of foul-smelling plants. But the boy was dying. Arawn had seen it happen too often to pretend otherwise. Th e curse of the Fomhóire, they called it, and it had no cure.
The boy moaned, a pathetic, feeble noise, as if he had not the strength to cry out his real pain, and Arawn turned sharply on his heel, grinding his teeth to stop the tremor of his mouth. He strode through the dark, smoky hall and out into the fresh spring air, relieved to get away from the smell of decaying flesh. The High King’s house was built in the manner of the country, wood-framed and high-beamed. But, unlike the houses of the petty kings, the interior was divided into separate chambers, dark and airless and strangely damp. Privacy was something the common people seemed not to appreciate, but the Fomhóire and those descended from them had never been able to rid themselves of their dislike of communal living, the smells of enclosed humanity, the heat and noise, the heaped piles of furs, the dogs rooting among the leavings, and the constant clamour of warriors and children as they clattered in and out of the halls.
An ancestral repugnance for humanity remained among the chaos of all that Arawn had acquired from the mingling of bloodlines. The Fomhóire were eternal – sluggish, plodding,
mindless certainly, but eternal. Nothing disturbed the course of their existence, no fears, no thoughts but to serve their master. Except for misadventure, they would trudge the earth forever. But by Arawn’s time, those first Fomhóire were long dead. Their creator had never intended they should reproduce themselves, never intended they should have any control over their destiny. They sowed forbidden seed, and they dwindled to shrivelled bags of sea debris.
In their descendants, the mingling of human blood, with its sparks of magic, its weaknesses and self-doubt, anguish and longing, had produced creatures both more and less than their forebears. The descendants of the giants from the sea had rid themselves of unthinking service to a despotic master, they thought their own thoughts, content to walk the earth as masters in their own right. But their immortal blood was diluted, tainted
with the ephemeral nature of human blood, and what precocious old age did not reap, the black flux took. Arawn ground his teeth in anger at fate that had set him before a board where the moves of the pieces were preordained, where he was condemned to lose.
The morning was dull, and clouds hung low and full of rain. The cold, salt-laden wind whipped over the cliffs with its scents of the deep ocean, and Arawn filled his lungs greedily. Standing on the stone wall that circled the rath, he could look down on the heaving ocean, see the fountains of spray as each wave crashed against the cliffs. His pale eyes, colourless and dull in the light of the sun, reflected the steely grey-green of the deep water, his skin and hair different tones of the shallows, of weed streamers and grey sand. The nostrils of his broad, snub nose dilated as he breathed deeply, his thin line of a mouth parted slightly, like a man saved from drowning. Coarse hair twisted through with gold and copper wire hung stiff and still, and only the fringe of his light wool cloak fluttered slightly in the wind.
The High King’s ringfort was perched on the sea cliffs; the ocean battered against it on the seaward side. On the other, a patchwork of broken rocks, whin and ling gave way to a green plain that stretched inland as far as the eye could see. In the south, the green carpet wrinkled over a string of low hills, and in the north, the green gave way to purple, then black, as the land rose sharply into gloomy mountains, their heads wreathed in cloud and grey veils of rain. As Arawn watched, a group of riders came into view from the north, their horses running with the plodding, tireless gait of Fomhóire mounts, both horses and riders stark black against the steely backdrop of the barren mountains. A shadow moved from the eaves of the hall and a clansman came to join him on the wall, his short cloak tugged by the wind, lank hair of a pale, lustreless brown whipped across his face.
‘How is the boy?’
‘The same.’ Arawn took a deep breath. ‘Still dying.’
The clansman kept a short, respectful silence, then pointed to the approaching riders on the plain below. ‘Mac Lochlainn. He should be bringing something to raise your spirits.’
The High King turned, his pale eyes, too wide-set in his toobroad face, glinted dully in a sign of anger. ‘You have sons, Darrach, have you lost even one of them?’
Darrach shrugged. ‘At birth, one perhaps.’
‘Can you not imagine what it’s like to lose them all? Aeron should have lived. I thought, after eighteen years… I would give all the milk-white girls in the kingdom to be able to keep
just one of my sons.’
‘But I have little of the sea people’s blood in me. ’Tis the strength of the father’s sea blood that makes the birthing hard on the women. Unless they are half sea folk themselves.
Maybe Mac Lochlainn’s kin will foil the curse and give you one that will live. They’re mountain folk, and if the girl’s like her kin, she’ll be strong. She might even survive the birthing. I’ve known mountain women bear babaí of a monstrous size —’
‘Spare me the details of your prize heifers! Has she the
blood of the sea people in her veins, this mountain girl? If not, however Talannach she may be, you know as well as I do what will be the outcome.’
Darrach shrugged again. ‘The Ó Lochlainn are loyal, wellbred people – a kinswoman of theirs has every chance of carrying sea-dwellers’ blood.’
Arawn’s eyes narrowed as he watched the riders, close enough now to distinguish the smallest, slightest rider, a single splash of white in their midst, half-hidden by the flying black cloaks and hair of the escort. ‘Let’s hope you’re right, Darrach. I am weary of waiting. This is the last one of your stubborn stock I will try.’
‘She’s not the only sheep on the¬—-’
‘Enough! I must have sons. I will have sons, even if I have to bed half the Northlands to get them.’
‘Tír Thuaidh?’ Darrach raised an eyebrow. ‘What do you want with those ill-dressed barbarians?’
‘Those ill-dressed barbarians are docile as pigeons. They hand over their talented children to their Keepers without a murmur. The Northlands are awash in what they call seerlore, and my ignorant codfaced cousins have not the least idea how to use it. I will have that power, Darrach. I will take every one of their odd-eyed womenfolk if I have to, and I will get sons on them.’
Darrach sniggered. ‘Is it heirs you want, Arawn, or an army?’
Arawn turned his dull eyes on his clansman, a glare that reflected the dim light of the shallows. ‘I and my sons will rule this broken world. The Beast will never have it. It has made me neither fish nor man, and though I live in a king’s hall, instead of progeny, I engender only the black flux. I will take the power the ancients used to enchain the Beast, and I will snatch this world from it, Darrach. I will spit in its face before I crush it entirely.’
‘And should their Talannach blood prove as feeble as our
own, and…’
‘I will not watch my line dwindle to the level of rustic chieftains, wallowing in black blood and useless female get with the faces of mackerel! I will destroy it all, and the Beast will watch, helpless. But if I win, I win eternity for me and mine. Will you take the wager with me?’
‘To lay waste to Tír Thuaidh and enslave the barbarians?’ Darrach’s
sullen face shone with a flicker of excitement. ‘I will. You will get your magic, Arawn, and who knows? It might even work.’
Today is release day for the first book in the Ys trilogy, an alternate 10th Century historical fantasy. It’s published by Northodox Press and you can order a paperback copy here.:
https://www.northodox.co.uk/product-page/the-darkest-tide-paperback-pre-orderhttps://www.northodox.co.uk/post/marriages-and-moonstones-by-jane-dougherty
the ebook here:
https://www.northodox.co.uk/product-page/the-darkest-tide-ebook-pre-order
There’s also a short story set in the world of Ys that you can read on the publisher’s blog here
https://www.northodox.co.uk/post/marriages-and-moonstones-by-jane-dougherty
I did visit the Oracle today, and she gave me a poem. I’ll post it tomorrow, as today I want to make an announcement. The Darkest Tide, first book of a mythological fantasy trilogy is available for pre-order! I’ve waited a long time for this, and Northodox Press have done a splendid job with the cover. Publication date is September 18, but if you order it now, you’ll get a sale price reduction.
Here is the link to the publisher’s website with the details.
In the land of the blind, a one-eyed girl must lead.
In a broken world that has forgotten its name, everyone has a secret. Una One-Eye sees with the eye that isn’t there, but the fishmen overlords must never know or they will kill her. Una’s mother knows how her child lost her eye and why. That is her deadly secret. Fiachra, Haldan Red-Hair’s thrall, is more than a slave. He sees the sapphire fire in Una’s empty orbit, but he keeps that to himself. Somewhere, a power is hidden that can destroy the tyranny of the fishmen and rebuild the drowned world of Ys. But where and how is a secret.
60 word microfiction. The prompt was ‘haunted house’.
The cellar door that refused to close was the first sign, then a heavy, furtive padding in the corridor outside the bedroom door. After the first scratches appeared, deep parallel gouges that splintered the oak, he added a bolt to the lock.
After centuries of forgetfulness, no one remembered the cat buried alive beneath the foundations. To bring luck.
Yesterday a friend suggested I join Substack. Well, I’ve been fiddling around with it, have no idea what I’m doing, but have just published my first post
If anyone reading this is on Substack, how about friending me or whatever they call it.
Didn’t have time to look at the prosery prompt yesterday, but this morning it made me think of the premise of Elsa Morante’s novel, L’Isola di Arturo, Arturo’s realisation as he comes out of boyhood, that his father’s marriage to a poor Neapolitan girl was a sop to respectability, and a front for his homosexual adventures.
Mother love
She always knew, that much is obvious now, the things my father got up to during his long absences. Though ‘knew’ is probably too precise a word. His longings and desires, what drove and embittered him had no echo in my mother’s constrained, traditional upbringing, which was mine too, until understanding dawned, and I broke away from its traditions of suppression and oppression.
Yet despite time and distance, her face follows me, dark-eyed and full of love, the same gold earrings because it would never have entered my father’s mind to buy her anything pretty, the embroidered headscarf, hands busy with work that always found the time to caress and comfort. Sometimes I feel that I am haunted. By how much our mothers do, not know, is surely how we should judge them? She loved me enough for two. That’s all that should matter.
Rosetta spent last night outside up a tree. She finally came down around 7am this morning full of beans and ready for anything. There was a festive reunion with Redmond though Bix and Ninnie seemed strangely disappointed.
I looked up how to discourage kittens biting, and one suggestion was to give them another animal to play with. I’m not sure this was what they meant.
Our youngest is very fond of the village with the Rembrandt so we took some of the family to visit it a couple of weeks ago. The Rembrandt isn’t really very inspiring. When you’ve seen one bleeding body on a cross you’ve seen them all. But I do like the church it’s in, and the statue of Mary and a jowly Jesus. There’s no inscription so it’s probably a local effort. I don’t know what the blue ribbons hung on Jesus’s arm signify.
The artist likely never travelled far from Gascony, never saw a Saracen, a Maure or a Persian, but probably had a wife, perhaps sisters, and there were women in the fields, babes in arms, in cradles, crawling on the floor. He fashioned faces from a distant past from those he knew, wife or peasant woman and her baby, no beauties these either. Notions of beauty were different then. Full face, round belly, straight limbs. What more could a mother want?
Village church
pale-plastered plaster-sainted
where dust motes float
incense-tasting
and lofty windows are full of sky.
An oracular story. The first page of words didn’t make any sense to me, so I just jotted them down and loaded the next page. Same thing, but a pattern emerged in the words. It wasn’t a poem, more a story. I followed it for five pages. Not what I was expecting at all.
Quickly he heaves his shadow over, still not light, no one about. He is ugly his face a wax mask, jabs his stick trawling the deep mud. Only a woman, a mother watches, bare-headed in the wind. I hear her scream, hands flutter, a finger points, and I see what he has dredged from the lake water.
Sea spray makes the heart ache. Stop, I say, but the man turns, shaking his head. The memories return sluggish and reluctant, not like a small child full of life, party-dressed. Where had she been going? Looking for flowers? To hunt for Easter eggs hidden in the grass. Somewhere people are filing into church. I let them, nothing will hurt her now.
She had followed the boy, swishing sticks through the dewy grass. He promised her chocolate, they searched, heads bent. But the moon slept, the sun was hidden. It rained that day I remember, and later, when the party began and music swelled over the water, it was too late.
Heart swollen with fear, the woman could only watch as they beat and beat the unyielding grasses, while the skin of the lake flinched beneath the stinging rain.
Now, at first light, he has come, the one she dreads, and he sees the pink in the mud. She knows what he has found and her heart’s blood pounds. The water roars, black and pitiless. She reaches out, perhaps to snatch the parting threads of a ghost.
The Four Swans 