The Green Man

I've a particular fondness for the Green Man, a character that appears again and again in European mythology. He's most often seen as a design element in old Cathedral architecture, but his face pops up here and there, often in places you wouldn't expect it. His appearance can vary, but it pretty much always incorporates leaves and other vegetation as part of his facial features--sometimes the leaves are on vines sprouting from his mouth, sometimes his face itself is made of leaves. Sometimes he's scary looking, menacing, tortured. Sometimes he's mysterious.

I've already mentioned, in a previous blog post, some of the elements that inspired the Verlvik character. But that post grew so long that I decided to leave the Green Man out. Still, because of my love for him, I decided he deserved mention too.

His influence on the Verlvik character might be most apparent at the end of Chapter 14, in which Athemon sees Verlvik for the first time:

Something rustled again in the bushes off to his left. Athemon watched the bird, fascinated. And then he felt a tap on his shoulder. Confused, he looked around. Grillis was still asleep, sprawled on the moss bedding. Perhaps Athemon was imagining things. But then he felt a tap on his shoulder again, and looked down on the grass at his side.

Two tiny bird skulls lay on the wet grass.

Alarmed, Athemon leapt to his feet, his head swiveling right and left, scanning the close-growing shrubs, the broad-fanned ferns. His eye passed over one particularly large bush twice before he realized there was a person’s face peeking out through its leaves.

A face. A green face, as green as the leaves around it. It was watching Athemon.

“Grillis!” Athemon shouted, stepping back.

Instantly the fighter was on his feet, mace in hand.

The face grinned, showing teeth as yellow as old ivory, a gap where the left eyetooth should have been. The right eye was an uncanny green, clear and bright as a gem. The left eye was covered with a milky film. Thick locks of ginger hair, knotted and tangled until they looked like lengths of rope, framed the face and tumbled down over a pair of slight shoulders.

The person stepped out from amongst the ferns. He was about the size and height of a ten-year-old, but something in his eyes told Athemon he was no child.

There was a necklace of bones strung around the little fellow’s neck, a thick belt of knotted brown hair around his waist. He had a short, straight stick strapped to his back. Except for the necklace, belt, and a loincloth—which looked like it had been made from pounded bark—he was naked, and all over his body his skin was just as green and dark as his face.

He stepped toward Athemon, still grinning, and nodded his head several times. And then he spoke.

“Cernunnos,” he said. “I have been searching for you.”

emotionally driven horror

Since I've already posted excerpts featuring the other two characters in Blood Brothers, I figured I'd post a third excerpt to introduce Athemon. While Grillis's point of view lends itself to descriptions of action, and Verlvik's POV lingers on metaphysical and mystical experiences, Athemon perspective results from a lifetime of vicious racial oppression. He's been viciously traumatized, he's got a huge chip on his shoulder, and he is just beginning to discover the power to give back some of the pain he's been given. So, a lot of the scenes shown through Athemon's eyes are shown through the lens of horror. Here's an example:

A hard shove knocked him out of his reverie, knocked him hard enough to make him sprawl on the ground. He rolled over quickly to face his assailant.

It was Hanswerth.

“Good morning, horn-head,” the portly bully said cheerfully. “What are you doing out of your pen?”

Jollsen and Rogyle, standing on either side of Hanswerth, chuckled at their leader’s wit.

Athemon looked up at them, saying nothing. He thought of his father’s warning the day before: don’t provoke the humans, or you will not be able to stay in this house.

Hanswerth smiled down at Athemon for a moment, and then abruptly dropped the smile. “Stand up when I’m talking to you, caprine,” he said.

Athemon stood up warily, careful not to look the butcher’s son in the eye.

“You should be happy I’m talking to you,” Hanswerth said. “You should be grateful for every chance you get to speak with your superiors. Come on, horn-head. Let me see you smile.”

Athemon’s face flushed dark with anger.

“I said smile!” Hanswerth barked.

Athemon closed his eyes, and thought of his father’s command: be humble. A sick feeling filled his stomach. He focused on the corners of his mouth, tried to lift them, willed his lips into a thin smile. It isn’t easy to smile when you feel like crying, but he did his best.

And then a heavy hand smashed into his mouth like a brick. His knees dropped out from under him, and he sprawled in the trash again. His mouth began to fill with a salt-copper taste, and a thin flow of blood streamed out over his chin. He thought of his uncle: we must punish the body to fight the sin. He thought of his father: be humble.

“What do you think you’re smiling at, you dirty goat-son bastard?” Hanswerth shouted. He sank his boot into Athemon’s side with a thud. The small caprine felt his ribs crack, felt a sharp ache spread up through his spine to his brain. He fell onto his side, and curled into a ball of agony.

Be humble. Punish the body to fight the sin.

For several moments Athemon knew nothing but pain. And then, as the rest of the world came back, he could feel the three boys standing over him. Their hate washed down on him like heat from the sun.

“Actually, we’re glad to find you, Athemon,” Hanswerth said, sounding jolly again. “You can help us clear something up. Thanks to you, we know that caprines really do have horns. But we still don’t know if their balls are pointed like a goat’s.”

Athemon felt hands grabbing at the waistline of his trousers, nearly pulling him off the ground. He tried to push the hands away, but a fist smashed across his face again. He heard his uncle’s voice: punish the body to fight the sin. The hands ripped at the drawstring to his trousers. He heard his father’s voice: be humble.

And then he heard another voice, a calm voice, a deep voice. He heard it more clearly than the cruel laughter of his tormentors, more clearly than the beating of his own harried heart. Burn them, Athemon, the voice said. Burn them!

A sudden rage filled him, flooding through his body like his blood itself was molten. The pain in his lip, the sharp ache in his ribs, fed that rage, stoked it like fuel thrown on a fire. He drew on the rage, pulled it into his heart, embraced it. It burned like a firestorm behind his sternum, growing and growing. And just when he thought he might explode from the power of his hate, he channeled that power into his outstretched hands. Athemon opened his eyes, saw heat bending the air around his hands, saw Hanswerth leering down at him. He reached out with both hands, grabbing the bully by the face, driving his thumbs into the butcher boy’s eyes. Burn them, Athemon! Burn them!

Sudden screaming brought him back to his senses. The air was thick with the stench of burnt meat. Athemon looked up, saw Rogyle and Jollsen standing back, a terrified expression on their faces.

“Look at his eyes,” Jollsen said. “Look at Athemon’s eyes!”

They turned and ran, stumbling in the trash, clawing past each other in their desperate need to escape.

The screaming hadn’t stopped. Athemon looked down at his hands, saw them clutching Hanswerth’s face, thumbs still buried in the fat bully’s eyes. He pulled his hands back. The bully’s eyes were now smoldering sockets, blood running from them like tears. And where Athemon’s hands had touched the bully’s face, the skin had blackened and burned away, exposing the muscle, tendon, even the underlying bone in certain places.

Athemon stood up, and looked at Hanswerth with fascination. The bully writhed on the ground like a wretched animal, his mouth still stretched wide with screaming. Athemon thought of all the cruel laughter that had come out of that mouth, all the harsh words and hateful taunting. And then he thought of his father’s command: be humble, don’t provoke the humans. He realized now that he could not return to his father’s house.

Pickers scattered throughout the dump were watching him, he realized also. There were a few destitute humans, one filthy dwarf, and even a handful of caprines. None of them had come to help him when the bullies were attacking him. But he hadn’t needed their help. Thinking about that, he reached up and touched the leather skullcap on his head. “I don’t need their help,” he said aloud, and then pulled the skullcap off.

Hanswerth was still screaming. Athemon wadded the skullcap up and used it to plug the fat oaf’s mouth. Then he lifted the corners of his own mouth in a smile. It was an honest smile, though the bully wasn’t able to see it.

solid, gritty, pulpy

The first excerpt of Blood Brothers that I posted on this blog was meant to illustrate the fun I had with "overdoing it"--indulging my desires to write in a lyrical way about far-out, mystic ideas and experiences. A lot of those sections take place within the chapters told from the Verlvik character's point of view. But I also had a lot of fun with more action-oriented (or, as Jim Butcher puts it in his interview with Patrick Rothfuss: "solid/gritty/pulpy") writing, and a lot of that writing comes in the chapters told from the perspective of the Grillis character.

So, to balance the previous excerpt, I figured I'd post an excerpt showcasing the gritty/pulpy action in Blood Brothers. Here's an example:

All the bewilderment in Grillis, all the shock and horror he felt, galvanized in that instant into rage. Before he had a chance to decide to act, before he’d consciously chosen an action, he was in motion. He rose up through the trap door like an avenging ghost, and stepped onto that killing floor with the axe head soaring into the air above him. Transfixed as they were with the gruesome spectacle, none of the men there noticed his ascent. But these weren’t men, Grillis knew in his heart. These weren’t men, these were monsters.

With all of his body bending backwards like a strung bow, Grillis brought the axe head back, and then he sent the first blow flying. It came down square on the crown of the nearest cleric’s skull, and kept on moving, down through the brain, through the spinal column, to finally clear solid matter just below the cleric’s shoulder blades. The man toppled forward lifeless, like a felled tree. Before his body hit the ground the axe was on a new path, up and over Grillis’s right shoulder, and then soaring back horizontally to the left, to tear through the side of the next cleric’s neck. The force was so great it sent the man’s head flying, flipping ear over ear in the air, spraying rings of blood.

Grillis’s mouth strained wide, crying outrage. It must have made a terrible racket, though he couldn’t hear it. All the sound that existed for him in that moment, as he stepped toward the third cleric, was the rush of blood in his ears.

By now the third cleric had warning of the danger closing in on him. But as he turned to face Grillis, and saw the woodcutter’s blood-spattered face, saw the carnage wrought in a mere handful of heartbeats, he quailed. His mace came up in a weak-handed blocking position, no match for the force of the twelve-pound axe. As Grillis brought the axe back from the blow that had beheaded the second cleric, he turned the motion into a vicious backhanded swing that swept the mace away, and smashed square into the third cleric’s mouth with the back of the axe head. Fragments of tooth and bone flew into the air as the man’s mouth caved in, and his limp body was thrown heavily against the wall, making the whole shack quake.

Grillis brought the axe into a ready position in front of him, and turned toward the remaining men in the room. There was a moment’s pause, and then several things happened simultaneously: the third caprine, who must have been Athemon’s father, turned and ran out the shack door; Ciranon’s hands went to the iron collar at his neck, and seemed to pass through the metal as though it were smoke, leaving the collar to fall to the wood floor with a clank; and another cleric, this one wearing brilliantly polished plate-mail armor over his tunic, raised his hand to point at Grillis, and spoke.

“Halt, demon!” the armored cleric boomed. It was the voice that had silenced Ciranon’s plea mere moments before. “Behold the light of the Goddess!”

Though the only sunlight in the room came through the door behind him, the cleric’s armor suddenly flared with light as though it were reflecting the brilliance of the sun. Grillis stumbled back, his left hand leaving the axe handle to try to shield his eyes from the glare. He heard Ciranon shout out a warning. Desperately, the dazzled woodcutter swung his axe one-handed.

It connected with something hard and brittle, and instantly a dozen points of pain opened on Grillis’s face. Less than a millisecond later a massive force smashed into him, knocking the breath from his lungs, carrying him backward to bang against the shack wall. The force was more than the shack could take. A sharp creak, almost like a dog’s yelp, filled the air, followed by the explosive cracking of wooden beams splintering apart.

“It’s coming down!” someone shouted.

Grillis threw his arms up to shield his head. The wall behind him gave way, the pressure pinning him to it seemed to jolt from some heavy blow, and then all was raucous sound and confusion.

overdoing it

Last week I posted a link to a video of Jim Butcher interviewing Patrick Rothfuss. The first question Butcher asks relates to Rothfuss's eloquence, i.e. the artful way he writes. Rothfuss mentions, in his answer, that he goes through a lot of revision in his writing process, and that doing so lets him feel free to really "overdo" it, because he knows he'll be able to look at it again later and see if what he's written works, or whether he was just "wanking around."

His words stood out to me. In the course of writing my novel Blood Brothers, my favorite moments tended to be the ones in which I really "overdid it". I had a lot of fun throwing prudence to the wind, and letting the purple prose gush forth. I did carefully evaluate those sections later, and I took the comments of several beta-readers into careful consideration, too--and in the end I almost always chose to let the "overdone" moments stand as they were (or, sometimes, I polished them up a bit). Like Rothfuss says, some readers will be turned away by such writing. But to me these moments are a blast.

Here's one of my favorites, in which the Verlvik character falls off the edge of a cliff:

Falling. Verlvik knew the sensation well. All pictsees did. As children, they spent as much time in the trees as they did on the ground. One thing that every pictsee learned about trees: sometimes you fall out of them.

Falling, therefore, was a familiar sensation for Verlvik. The instant of weightlessness at the start of the fall, the embrace of gravity that followed it, the feeling of the world rushing past you as you plummeted, Verlvik knew all of this as well as he knew the feeling of strong sun on his skin, or of rough bark beneath his feet. He knew falling like he knew the beating of his own heart.

But a key part of what he knew about falling, as key as the double-pulse rhythm of a heartbeat, was landing. Either right-side up or upside down, landing always followed falling. In a way, it consummated the falling experience. By its contrast, and by its inevitability, landing helped to define what falling was. And usually it happened rather quickly, almost always more quickly than you expected.

So in certain ways, as Verlvik fell off the cliff, as he felt the pull of the earth take hold of him and draw him downward, what he felt was quite unfamiliar. As the world plummeted by, and continued to plummet—as the earth’s pull drew him down more and more fiercely—Verlvik discovered that what he was experiencing now was rather different than anything else he’d ever experienced. Without the quick landing to fulfill the rhythm of falling, the sensation of falling became foreign to him. What he had known as intimately as his own heartbeat had become something entirely different, and entirely new.

Perhaps this is why his heart itself was behaving so strangely. At the start of the fall—the moment of weightlessness before gravity took hold—his heart had frozen in a clench. And now as he fell, as he remained suspended in that fall without a landing to return things to normalcy, his heart seemed unable to decide what course it should take. And so it held on, frozen in that clench, unwilling or unable to resume beating as normal.

His heart wasn’t the only thing acting strangely, either. The rope-like locks of his hair, which normally hung limply to the top of his shoulders, now writhed in the wind like snakes. His wide-open eyes flowed with tears, which in itself wasn’t unusual considering that wind, but instead of flowing down his face like tears normally do, these tears ran outward from the corners of his eyes, spreading over his temples, running into his ears.

Verlvik shook his head to clear his ears, and realized that though his heart seemed too stupefied to move, the rest of him still could. And so he turned his head to look at the massive waterfall to his left, and realized with delight that the torrent of water was falling at the exact same speed as he was: dreamily slow.

In fact, watching that water, Verlvik suddenly became convinced that neither the water nor he himself was actually moving at all. It was the cliff walls, and all of the rest of the world, that moved, passing him by.

Verlvik rolled onto his back to look up at where he’d been. He could see the top of the cliff soaring away into the sky. Father Longhair was up there, just a silhouette at this distance, looking down. Verlvik waved to him. It reminded him of being at the bottom of one of the massive forest trees, and seeing someone up at the top. And that led Verlvik to thinking of how trees had to pull water through their roots, and pass it up through their long trunks, to feed their leaves hundreds of feet above the ground. A tree, he decided, was sort of like a waterfall in reverse.

His stupefied heart, the velocity with which the mist-laden air rushed by, and the notion of every tree being a backward waterfall—together it all left Verlvik feeling rather breathless. He rolled onto his stomach again and opened his mouth wide. Air rushed in through his mouth, inflating his lungs, filling his body with moisture-heavy vapor. The mist was inside of him now. The physical form of the Great Goddess was filling him up.

He had fallen hundreds of feet already—or rather, hundreds of feet of the cliffs had passed him by—and he was nearing the thick cloud below. He could see it roiling and tumbling beneath him. The power gathered by the falling water must have been incredible, and when the water reached the bottom of the cliff it hit with enough force to vaporize a part of itself, to turn itself into the cloud, to become the mists ascending above the cloud, to become the heavy rain falling on the tops of the cliffs.

And then he had passed into the cloud. All around him, a white void. He could no longer see the falling water. He could no longer see the cliff walls passing him by. There was no motion, and no time. He was floating in a boundless white nothingness, as if the form of the world no longer existed, or had not yet been born. His lungs felt full to bursting. The Great Goddess was within him, filling him up. And he was within the Great Goddess.

He raised his hands to his face, but the cloud was so thick that he couldn’t see them. Or perhaps they were no longer there. His body had disappeared, had been absorbed into the cloud. His body had been absorbed by the body of the Great Goddess. There was no division between himself and Herself anymore.

Slowly, the white around him began to dim, to darken. The cloud became smoke. The smoke became ash. The ash became coal. And the coal became the black darkness of dreamless sleep.

And then, having returned to a familiar experience, his heart finally released its clench, and began to beat anew.