The Black Prince: Part II (57 page)

It was the hair, she decided. Green eyes were common enough in the North, if not Isla’s color green. But hair like hers was not.
Bronwen, Bronwen, hair as black as a raven’s wing
.

“Be careful,” Tristan said, quoting from the same song. “My kisses are laced with the juice of an apple.”

She wanted his kisses, very much.

“Well,” Arvid said, recounting the events of the siege to some other dignitary whose name Isla could not remember, “we couldn’t let the bad guys win? No? So of course we had to fight.”

Rudolph laughed. He and Greta had finally made their way over. Somehow. “Of course not.”

“You have a strong devil.” Arvid patted his belly. “There is a phrase among my people. It does not so much translate into your tongue, which is for women-men to sing songs of sadness. A devil comes into me, we say! Meaning that, in times of adversity, us warriors find the extra stamina to oppose evil. And to take a joy from doing so. From being the right arm of Bragi here on earth.”

“I like that,” Rudolph said. He sounded contemplative.

“Yah.” Arvid swatted him on the back. “Now use that devil to make babies!”

Isla felt a touch on her elbow and turned. Apple. And beside her Eir.

“Apple,” Eir hissed, “has…something to tell you.”

“Oh?” Isla wasn’t certain that she could stand too many more surprises. Even good ones. After all, the average mother got nine months to prepare herself for the idea that she would now have a baby.

“I…am going to live amongst the gnomes.”

Isla glanced at Eir, and then back at Apple. “Are you certain?”

Apple nodded. “I…there my past sins will count for less.”

“You’re welcome to remain with us, you know.”

She nodded again. “Yes. And I thank you for that.”

Isla waited. Studied her stepmother. A woman who had also changed. In her own way, as much as Isla had.

Her lips folded into a small smile. There and gone. “But my time has come to go, I think.”

Isla understood. There came a time, to all of them, when change could no longer be denied. For it came to all of them, sooner or later. Isla had been focusing on her own transformation but in truth, the past almost year had left none untouched. Some, like Rudolph, had changed for the better. Both he and his life would have been unrecognizable to the man he was before. And some, like Rowena, lay moldering beneath the ground because they could not change. Death, in the end, had been preferable to a future so fraught with uncertainty.

Apple had a right to be happy. Regardless of what she’d done. Isla didn’t have to like her, or even to absolve her of her misdeeds, for that to be true. To move forward, to embrace change, meant to forgive. To accept life as it was and, therefore, see the beauty it offered.

And she hoped, truly, that Apple would be happy in the mountains.

A life lived in the past, framed by what could have been, was a life half lived.

Somewhere, Asher shouted and Aveline laughed.

Hart put his arm about Lissa, and whispered something into her ear.

Isla was about to speak, to perhaps share some of these thoughts, when Arvid started bellowing again. “All this talk of stamina makes for hunger! And Rudolph here, too, he needs his strength. Let’s eat!”

THE END OF BOOK THREE: PART II

Thus CONCLUDES the tale. Thank you for being a part of this world and for sharing in Isla’s, Tristan’s, and everyone else’s adventures. As you turn the final page, its author is hard at work on new and exciting projects. Look for them on Amazon and in your local bookstore as well as read sample chapters at pjfoxwrites.com. P.J. Fox also welcomes visitors to her Facebook page, facebook.com/pjfoxwrites, where they can learn the latest updates on her projects as well as what she herself is doing. She encourages fans to contact her, and welcomes questions and comments of all kinds.

It might surprise some readers to know that Arvid is based on a real person.

That person is a girl, and one of my closest friends. And she most certainly does not have a beard. What she does have is what in Norwegian is known as dugnadsånd, or dugnads-spirit. What, from my own background, would be called
ordnung
. Another word that doesn’t translate readily into English but encapsulates, rather, an ideal: of how one relates to one’s community, and to the world. And of the role one sees oneself as having. Ordnung is the golden rule, and the actions one takes to live it. It is being a helper.

“When I was a boy,” Fred Rogers is quoted as saying, “and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, ‘Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.’” My friend who inspired Arvid is one such helper, and has taught me a great deal about what it truly means to be a friend—and a modern day Viking. There are many ways to be brave, but choosing to be a helper in these troubled times is perhaps the bravest choice of all. When Arvid first sorrows with Hart, not because he pities Hart and not because he thinks sharing the burden will ease it, but simply because that is what friends do, that is my friend. And when he then goes with Hart to exact revenge, that is also my friend. A helper in every sense of the term.

Although people, places, and things from the so-called “real” world do make it into my books, on occasion, I tend rarely to reveal this fact. Because, apart from all other considerations, we’re never talking about a one to one comparison. A novel is a work of fiction, not a biographical portrait—of anything. One character in particular might contain a kernel of truth, but that character is still a whole person in and of themselves. A person who exists solely in my mind and, if I’ve done my job, perhaps now a little in yours.

A common theme in my books is the feeling of being “other.” I grew up “other,” in almost every sense of the term.
The Price of Desire
tells, to some extent, the story of how I met my husband. After I—to all intents and purposes—ran away from home, I might as well have been in space and he, an ambassador from what was assuredly an alien culture, came along and rescued me. In every way that a person can be rescued. I agreed to marry him almost immediately after meeting him and I was quite young and that was ten years ago and I couldn’t be happier.

But is my husband the governor of a mining planet where people are terrified of toilets? No. Of course not.

Nor have we experienced many of the difficulties that Kisten and Aria have and nor do we have an open relationship. Because Kisten and Aria, although their story contains an element of my truth, are their own characters. Likewise, Tristan and Isla are their own characters. As are Hart, and Arvid, and all the rest. Their truths are also my truth in the sense that they all come from inside me and are, thus, influenced in their creation by my own specific view of the world.

When it comes to translating something so highly personal into world building, though, the dynamic grows a bit more complicated. To what extent is Morven based on a real place? To what extent does it exist purely in my imagination?

Those who follow my various online presences with any degree of regularity know that I have a degree in medieval history from a major Boston-area university. I set
The Black Prince Trilogy
in—my slightly fantastical version of—England’s high middle ages not because of that degree but, rather, for the same reason I got it in the first place: I absolutely love the time period and always have. Before, during, and after those few precious years of organized study, I never stopped learning.

One of the major goals I had for the series was to portray, as accurately as possible, what life was truly like for the average person during the time period historians would come to know as The Great Anarchy. So much of what we think we “know” about certain time periods is informed, not by fact but by fantasy. Sometimes literally. One of the complaints I’ve received about the series is that it doesn’t match up with what film franchises like
The Lord of the Rings
have taught us to expect.

Another—and possibly related—complaint has been that there was too much history. In a series that is, ultimately, at least in part about history. Of a certain time period, yes, but also about how history can shape us. Isla’s circumstances and, thus, her available choices are dictated by her father’s choices before her. There can be no meaningful conflict over what it means to be a dutiful daughter, husband, son, or wife if no one comes from anywhere. If there are no ties that bind.

Our history shapes us.

Morven is, ultimately, a kingdom of the mind. The discussion of sunscreen is historically accurate, as is repeated use of the words
fuck you
. As are all the other thousands of, admittedly sometimes bizarre, minutiae. Sunscreen has been understood as a concept and indeed manufactures, in various forms, for thousands of years. The ancient Greeks used olive oil and the ancient Egyptians used a variety of different preparations including zinc oxide. Which is still used today.

Which is part of what, to me, makes the middle ages so captivating: things were so different and yet, in so many—often truly surprising—ways, they were so much the same. A great deal of what our forebears encountered, in their daily lives, would seem normal to us. While still other aspects of life during the high middle ages would seem horrifying. As, no doubt, our own times will some day seem horrifying to our descendants.

There can be, at times, almost a post-apocalyptic feel to a world where people compose love poems and argue politics amid rivers—literal rivers—of raw sewage. Skits skewering the president, ladies’ magazines, even
Twilight
all had their analogs. And yet, even as people were standing in line at the perfume shop checking their horoscopes, their neighbors were being burned as witches.

A strange time, a frightening time, but a relatable time. And a time when people absolutely knew that pigs used mud for sunscreen and told each other to go fuck themselves because these aspects of life were heritages of
their
ancestors. They, like we do today, considered themselves educated and
wanted
to be educated. They were as modern in their minds as we are, now, in ours.

Which fact highlights, I think, one of the greatest misconceptions about medieval life: that it existed in some sort of vacuum, where people spoke and thought and acted completely differently and valued peculiar and sometimes arbitrary things.

Take misconceptions about language, for example. People didn’t , in fact, walk around declaiming in ye olde renaissance faire-style English. English as we know it didn’t exist at all. Rather, much of what most of us think of as “old English” is a heritage of that fact and dates from the 1600’s—or later. People talked then the same way we talk now: simply, and with purpose. They were limited, as we are, not by intent but by the constructs of their native tongues.

That older writings contain certain anachronisms isn’t a heritage of people somehow having been more stuffy and formal back then but rather stands as testament to our ever-evolving language. Case in point: the progressive tense. The King James Bible, written several hundred years after the time period this book is meant to represent, was translated into English at a time when “modern English” was really still coming into its own. And, like in today’s modern German, there was no progressive tense. Phrases like
he doth go
shouldn’t, therefore, be interpreted as evidence of everyone being all fancy but rather viewed as an interesting testament to how many things we tend to assume are permanent in fact aren’t.

Moreover, were I to have made
The Black Prince Trilogy
truly historically accurate, I’d have had to write it in Anglo-Norman, Occitan, or Latin. And, of course, not include a demon. As those certainly weren’t features of the true middle ages. Any period of it. At least, not in the literal sense. And this is where one, as a writer, must clarify what the goal actually is. Am I aiming to write an historical treatise—which some claim I’ve done, regardless—or to tell a good story?

I tend to think of my modern English as a translation. In this case, of Anglo-Norman into modern English. Which meant writing something readable, or at least arguably readable, to modern people while still preserving the essence of the period I was hoping to evoke. Which in turn, of course, meant that certain anachronisms were out. A house couldn’t be buttoned up tight against a storm; buttons hadn’t been invented yet. Isla couldn’t feel an electric thrill when she didn’t know what electricity was. Between “accessible to modern readers” and “taking your readers right out of the story” is a fine line to walk, indeed.

Interestingly, though, many of the most modern-seeming phrases that we use today are in actuality heritages of our ancient past. Like
fuck you
. Back in the good old days when the senate ruled the republic, Rome’s fine citizenry used to gather together underneath the arches supporting the city’s famous aqueducts. For much the same reasons people gather under underpasses, today: to score drugs and to score with each other. Now the word for arch, in Latin, is
fornix
.

As in, to fornicate. To do it under the arches. Literally, in Latin, to arch.

“Arching” thus became a verb the way fucking became a verb: an outgrowth of some really rude slang. And, actually, they’re the same verb, just with different spellings and pronunciations. But they mean the same thing, and come from the same place, and, indeed, started out as the same word.

So, like with sunscreen, the issue of what feels “too modern” can often rest on a certain set of preconceptions. Particularly in regards, not simply to what people did and didn’t understand but what they
wanted
to understand. It’s important to remember, therefore, that our forebears might have been ill-educated by our modern standards but they weren’t stupid. Indeed, our current scholarship rests on their shoulders. We know what we know now, because generation upon generation before us built up a foundation a little at a time. A foundation that began with a question: why?

A great many things were, certainly by the high middle ages but in many cases much earlier, understood—if imperfectly—through observation. Because people did want to understand their world. Thus, a world that was governed by Hippocrates’ theory of humors also understood that pregnant women needed a diet rich in folic acid to prevent birth defects. The term
folic acid
didn’t exist yet, of course; what our ancestors knew was that certain foods, like asparagus, were necessary to health. Simply because they’d observed this to be so. Their theories on why might have been flawed—the leading theory at the time being that it was shaped like a penis and foods shaped like penises gave women strength to combat birth defects—but the result was that pregnant women were generally fed, to the extent that they could be, a diet rich in vegetables.