I'm sure I'm not so interesting. Let me tell you about the books instead.
Imagine a civilization that had no use for papyrus or paper. Everything thought important was inscribed on clay tablets: accounts, taxes, the movements of the planets, and jewel-like accounts of moments in people's lives, written down – so they said – by magical means.
Time passes. Many of these records crumble to dust, others are lost forever, and still more are dissolved away by the waters that lie beneath the sands. Incredibly, some survive the centuries: a few by sheer luck, some by being the victim of fire, which bakes their clay into a hardness that survives the millennia.
When we look back at that incredible civilization, we see mostly blackness, but it's a dark illuminated by the occasional shooting star of a moment of someone's life, recorded in clay.
That's how I hope the first three tales from the lands of the sweet waters will seem to you: small glimpses into the darkness of time.
The first, Squire Chloe's Demon tells how Chloe battled against a darkness that came for her.
In the second, Another Side of Destiny we meet two other people of the City of the Sun, no sword-wielding squires these, but a couple trying to find their path between fate and destiny.
The third, and shortest, tale, Clay for Ellen, takes place a generation later. It's of a man who wants to see the truth behind masks. His tale would probably not have been recorded – too slight in the bigger scheme of things – except that he becomes a pawn in the games of others. His path intertwines with that of Alia, a sister of the seal.
The fourth tale, A Sister of Sword and Seal is rather different. It’s a much larger, and amazingly intact, account of the intense life of Alia, a new page – the lowest rank of the city's Temple. The life she tells us of is of secrets within secrets, and those secrets are deadly.
Coming soon, in Charm Counter Charm, we will learn of the lives of the destined of the City of the Sun, and of the brothers whose lives are magically entwined with them, for good and for ill.
Q&A With the Author:
What’s your project?
To publish translations of tales from the Lands of the Sweet Waters.
Where is that?
I’d rather not go into that. That’s my name, by the way, we don’t know what they called their land, or even if they had a name.
Why don’t you want to say?
I’d rather not go into that, either.
Translations, you say. Of what?
Clay tablets, and… other things.
Clay tablets? Fascinating.
Very, very, old clay tablets., perhaps as older than five thousand years, with stories written on them of some of the lives of a very ancient civilization, with people very like us, but in a different world.
Different how?
They write that they had magic. Magic was part of their lives, like say… I don’t have an example really. We don’t have anything like it.
Why now? Why haven’t they been translated before?
That’s complicated. I think they have been, and the knowledge of the translations kept secret. My best guess is that it happened a little after the translation of cuneiform, supposedly the world’s oldest written language. The man who I think did made the first translations was knighted by Queen Victoria.
Why haven’t we all heard of this before?
Have you heard of the secret cabinet, the Gabinetto Segreto. No? It’s filled with Roman erotic art, that the Victorians thought pornographic.
These stories are porn?
Wow, no. Though they had a different attitude to sex, in some ways they were much more relaxed than us, like the Roman’s. In that way they seem quite modern.
No, I mean I think they were suppressed because of something the Victorians really didn't like, the magic. It was so part of these people’s lives, it’s difficult to dismiss it all as superstition, and not being able to do that didn't fit well with Victorian science.
I've read suppressed minutes of one of the Royal Societies of London, sometime in 1859 if I remember rightly. The debate was between those who thought all this talk of magic nonsense, so it should be suppressed, to not give ammunition to the credulous, and those who though there was something in it, who wanted to keep it quiet for that reason.
There was a chance that if the magic was true, it could be used. This was the Age of Empires. British, French and German scholars were always fighting for imperial advantage. Tablets went to the British Museum, to the Louvre and to Berlin, where they were looted by the Red Army in 1945. Many museum pieces were returned to East Germany two decades later, but not tablets from what I call the Lands.
And is it true, the magic?
I don’t see how it could be. Though they certainly thought so.
When will the first book translation be published?
It’s taking a while. I have translated three shorter works, which are now published on various platforms, and the first longer work, A Sister of Sword and Seal, is out now.
And thanks for listening.
[Interview excerpts from the Secret History of the Lands of the Sweet Waters]
