Minor Keys No. 15

The path of a book to the heavenly library is strewn with good intentions. The character of Raashid in Azimuth was one I always imagined I would develop. As you can see from this extract, he is a favoured friend and potential lover for Princess Sabiya. In this sense a novel mimics life in that you meet people and you think that a great friendship might ensue but somehow the fates deny you, or your emotional needs become satisfied elsewhere - or they turn out to be less attractive the more you get to know them. Indeed, a friend of mine often quotes his acquired one liner, “The greater the friendship the greater the treachery.”

Later that morning she was visited by a handsome young man, a noble dressed stylishly in the silks of the day, his burnished hair made up into a topknot, -Your wig is a work of art, she giggled, -Was it taken from the living?

 -In truth, yes. It is a woman’s head of hair which I purchased and had made up, so. It cost silver. When my normal hair grows enough after my interlude as a scribe, I will store it until I have use for it, again. His eyes were mischievous and bold and there had been moments when Princess Sabiya felt that she might make him her first lover but, somehow, the feeling always passed.

Why am I drawn to him? I suppose in my own life I have always found charming reprobates attractive, whether men or women. Being a double Libran, I am told, magnetises me to beautiful, creative people. Whatever, Raashid is a naughty young man but noble and loyal despite his errant nature. He grew up the apple of everyone’s eye, a sort of Hamlet in court life (before the killing of his father), a lover of the arts, a frequenter of gambling dens and an indulger in high class courtesans. He grew up alongside Sabiya but could never quite rid himself of his sense of her being more like a sister than a potential lover, despite his blood being aroused by her beauty. As we know from Azimuth, he is a theatre director and actor, taking much pleasure in lampooning key figures in court life. He is also an adept drummer and swordsman. Raashid is, in fact, the most eligible bachelor in the empire.

Despite the events in Azimuth, where, because of his loyalty to Sabiya’s daughter, he crosses her formidable mother, he is forgiven and eventually made commander of all the armies of the empire. Whatever it was in his upbringing that made him seem at times feckless, he never displayed it as a military general. He was adroit, tough and uncompromising when it was needed. However, his charm and lateral cast of mind meant that wars were few and harmony prevailed between the empire and its neighbours. He made an exceptional marriage, following the trend set by the Emperor Haidar in marrying a black-skinned Ethiopian from Sabiya’s blood line and had seven children by her. He was responsible for the first ever public health programme, entrusting its management and development to two young doctor friends of Sabiya’s daughter, Shahrazad and he rewarded all clan chiefs who ensured that their people could read and write, a silver piece for every one who could pass a test for literacy. It was owing to his efforts that there was an enormous explosion of science and the arts across the empire, which was then responsible for a general renaissance of intellectual striving in occidental societies. Raashid lived to a venerable age and was given a state funeral of extraordinary splendour by Shahrazad, which was attended by dozens of heads of state from across the continents. He proved the theory that, if you put your trust in a man of the arts rather than a professional politician to run social affairs in your country, you can develop a culture which is fair, just and responsive to its people.

www.azimuthtrilogy.com

(Azimuth by Jack Sanger also in Kindle books at Amazon)

All works by this author at www.chronometerpublications.me

Minor Keys No. 14

The importance of food in societies through time has two obvious sources. The first is that we eat to survive and so we ritualize food and exalt it, making it central to our various measures of the quality of life. We are what we eat. The second is that it represents the most obvious route to friendship. We offer food to bond with another. Traditionally, particularly in more nomadic or isolated societies, a stranger is housed and fed and no questions asked. Do you bite the hand that feeds you? For royal courts the opportunity to eradicate the ruler, at the moment when all guard is down, is always there. Food poisoning was an act that struck at the heart of the ritual of proclaiming friendship and kinship, where all enmity was supposed to be banished. It is hard today to feel the intense power of this human tradition given that everything we do today has become distanced and displaced, particularly through our virtualising of relationships with mobile phones, laptops and social media. People still go out to restaurants to eat together but the act is almost always a carefully choreographed one, even on first dates with strangers. They are not usually invited into the home for a first viewing, nor is a cold call knock at the door answered with, “Come in and eat.”

To guard against the royal guard being dropped, so to speak, food tasters were employed by courts. None took this more seriously than the head cook whose very life depended on food reaching his/her masters, perfectly presented, tasting sensational – and carrying a guaranteed list of healthy ingredients excluding additives such as strychnine or arsenic. In Azimuth we never meet the head cook but he is referred to here, by a royal maid:

“The head cook is well liked as a master. Though he swears and shouts he is very fair to all. Why, he had to dismiss a young cook only yesterday for pilfering but he still took pity on him and gave him a week’s wages.”

I’d imagine, like many of the minor characters being fleshed out in these blogs, he comes from generations of cooks. From an early age he was groomed by his father, himself the revered chef of a noble family, to go out to the market, to choose produce carefully, to experiment with complementary flavours and textures, to explore the staple crops, herbs and spices of other cultures, to research the effects of food on sexual activity, physical health and sleep until, in the end, the head cook became an expert all round therapist.

To remain at the top of his profession – head cook to the emperor – he had to be a harsh task master. He was sympathetic, if loud and dictatorial, to his staff and developed a tight coterie of loyal workers. It was very hard for any family to get a son apprenticed to him for he refused bribes on that score. His most difficult emotional issue was in the employment of a food taster. It was a paradox that this individual , the recipient of all that was great in the culinary arts, would be the ultimate indicator of the head cook’s professionalism at the kitchen end of the food chain. At the other end, at the emperor’s own table, was a second taster who tried everything on his plate in case an assassin had poisoned the food en route from kitchen to table. He was never allowed to meet this second taster in case the bond that they developed would represent an Achilles heel in the security of the Emperor. The head cook’s fame came not only from his immense gifts in cookery but from the fact that at least ten tasters had died in his kitchen, defending the emperors with their stomachs. The head cook consoled himself while crying bitter tears, by insisting to himself that these victims had tasted food that would have caused the very gods to salivate.

www.azimuthtrilogy.com

(Azimuth by Jack Sanger also in Kindle books at Amazon)

All works by this author at www.chronometerpublications.me

Minor Keys No. 13

How many men have a fantasy of a harem? It has been the stuff of literature and actuality over the centuries, whether based on a historical Persian model, the tribal realities we may still find in parts of the world, the brief epoch of free loving hippy communes or the strange megalomania of religious cults. The latter I have always found most unsettling. In my own journey through life, a reasonably varied and entertaining one, I have come across a number of individuals and communities with religious pretensions of the more esoteric kind who conflate sex and religious ritual with a perverse dynamic energy. I wrote in a recent Twitter one liner that it was a measure of a religion’s value to humankind, how it embraced sex (@profjacksanger). Sex has the capacity to be a wild demon, capable of reducing priest, nun, king, queen or law-abiding spouse from any stratum of society from  God-fearing conservatism into obsessional irrationality. Whole kingdoms are thrown away as the lure of sex transcends the most ingrained social conditioning. Sex and power can hardly be divided. It is likely that hundreds of thousands of men and women alive today have more than a smattering of Genghis Khan genes, such was his prodigious sexual appetite. Indeed, you may come across a similarly driven individual in the third book of the Azimuth trilogy. And it is not just in the extreme embrace of lustful desires that we can see the odd relationship between sex and the theological. In the social control of whole populations religions have sought to maintain their hold via a vice-like control over the sexual instincts of their adherents with complex regulatory rituals and measures regarding what is permissible and what not. In Azimuth there is not just one minor character representing this awkward area of human endeavour but many, the numerous women living harmoniously with the man who saved them from sexual slavery and death. Their saviour is speaking here:

So here I was in this mountain refuge with so many women. None wanted to leave. They had been soiled by life. At first they thought they might set up a religious clan but I persuaded them otherwise. Believe in yourselves, I said. Make this retreat a place of delight, a sanctuary for your spirits. You will find god in other ways if that is what you need.

Their background, if we are searching for commonality, is that they are all village women from the fields. Their entire lives until their kidnap by armed pillagers would have been spent following a daily round with little exception, brightened only by feasting at births, marriages and deaths. Having been captured and their men and children killed, then taken to a mountain hideout, their future was condemned to be little more than slavery, abuse and death. Suddenly all this changed. Like a dervish, their saviour came with his sword in the night and dispatched all their captors. Now free they could have gone back to find husbands in other villages but they chose not to. They preferred instead a harem life with the one man they could trust. In return he gave them protection and education and he fulfilled whatever sexual and maternal desires they had. Life was now different. It was no longer a question of having implicit social roles. Each day could be entirely as they wished. The effect upon them was profound.  To have lost their husbands and children was appallingly traumatic. To have found liberation and autonomy was utterly magical. Which life would they have chosen now that they knew both?

www.azimuthtrilogy.com

(Azimuth by Jack Sanger also in Kindle books at Amazon)

All works by this author at www.chronometerpublications.me

Minor Keys No. 12

Some lines of poetry guide you through life. Believers may find them in the Koran, the Bible or the Vedas but for me the distillation of meaning that a poet achieves occasionally is inextinguishable, burning like pure sulphur on water. Here is a quote from one of Rilke’s poems about The Unicorn.

O this is the animal that does not exist,
But they didn't know that, and dared nevertheless
To love it...and because they loved it, it came to
be a...pure creature.
They always left a space for it,
and in that space, clear and set aside,
it lightly raised its head, and hardly needed to be.

Why do I find it so powerful? It is an emblem of the imagination. I wrote in a recent tweet, “Reality is limited only by a lack of imagination” (@profjacksanger). Literature is an outlet for boundless thought as in all the arts, including film – Tarkovsky’s Stalker comes to mind as having similar power in fuelling my own imaginative output. The key for me in the Rilke lines is that the artist creates what was not there and it becomes ethereally extant, a new reality for those who see, touch, read it, affecting their lives forever, in some way small or big.

Creating the other world of Azimuth allowed me to construct a space where I and my readers could play. All the elements of life that are hard to fathom – death, love, war, existence – could be explored, shaped, remodelled, dissected and in such a way that we become one step closer to understanding the nature of our living reality. But lightly, with amusement and tolerance for how patched up and imperfect we all are as human beings.

A minor character that makes just one appearance in Azimuth: the Second Journey, is the assistant librarian. He is introduced thus:

Where were the vibrations from above made by slippered feet or the movement of furniture? Even though it was just daybreak there should have been much servant activity. Then he caught the sound of someone coming down the circular stairs. He was unnerved but fought off the desire to hide and sat facing the bottom of the staircase where three steps were visible. First a pair of red slippers and then the hem of a robe became visible until finally his assistant turned the bend.

His story (beyond the pages of Azimuth) is a familiar one. He was born into a family which for generations had been literate. Not scholars, you understand, but the kind you still see today in countries where education is sparse and who sit at desks with typewriters in village squares preparing documents for their illiterate fellows so that they might navigate the imposing tyranny of a country’s bureaucracy. Apart from an arranged marriage and the rare day when he is allowed to see his wife, the assistant librarian’s whole world is encompassed by the circular walls of the royal library, his vitality sucked from him by the shelves of dry parchment and arid tomes. He has none of the gifts of the royal historian, being, essentially, a trained orderer, tidier, cataloguer, categoriser of the artefacts that are collected for the royal library. He reads enough to place them where they can be found again but little more. There is too much to be done and his existence does not allow for the self-advancement of his mind. Thus he lives and dies - and it would be hard for anyone, no matter how much s/he believes in the value to humanity of every individual’s life, to make a case for the assistant librarian’s as offering anything to the common good.

www.azimuthtrilogy.com

(Azimuth by Jack Sanger also in Kindle books at Amazon)

All works by this author (and aka Eric le Sange) at www.chronometerpublications.me

Minor Keys No. 11

As an agnostic, Buddhism has many attractions, not least its refusal to give any oxygen to discussions about the possibility of a god. Azimuth debates whether a god exists but surreptitiously, like a niggling little voice at the back of the reader’s mind while s/he is engaged in the Ulysses-like adventures of the Magus or the labyrinthine plots and mysteries of court life. Writing an engaging discourse on the nature of reality, religions, life and death via the vehicle of an accelerating historical saga full of everyday AND extraordinary events was intoxicating and I hope that this is conveyed to you when you read the book. The inner tales of Azimuth are set at a time before the Buddha, containing much of the great man's practical advice for living a good life and within them there is plenty of opportunity for other theological debate. A minor character with much to say about such matters is the Scientist who lives on an island in the middle of a great river, somewhat like the Volga. We meet him thus:

A short while later the door re-opened to reveal a tall, white-haired man in the silk robes of a merchant. His eyes glinted in his smiling face. He strode forward and embraced the Warrior heartily. Then he turned and gave the woman a graceful bow.

  -I was expecting you, Warrior and this woman.

  -My Mother.

  -Nay, she is too young and delicate to have birthed such a lion of a man! The Warrior smiled at his mother’s confused pleasure at the traditional compliment.

It was a joy to write about this man even if, as I have said, the words passed through my brain without touching the sides. Why? Because he represents progression and rationality in civilized enquiry. We know that scientific advances are haphazard. Great breakthroughs occur and are not recognized for what they are for decades or even centuries. Some advances such as gunpowder or the crossbow were discovered and used by the Chinese hundreds of years before their ‘discovery’ in the west. Columbus was pre-dated in his so-called discovery of America by numerous unsung heroes. The Scientist was full of exceptional discoveries. One such which he showed to the Magus and his mother was a prototype of a magnifying glass revealing much that the eye can not discern. A wonderful little conceit for the novelist wanting to allegorize about reality! If there is more than meets the eye then whatever else might exist beyond human perception?

So what is the back story regarding the Scientist? What might I tell you that might provoke a little curiosity so that you want to read about his influence on the narrative of Azimuth?

Well, he was obviously precocious from a toddler onwards. Being from a rich merchant family he picked up language alarmingly quickly and accompanied his father along the Silk Road to the east. Wherever he went he sought out alchemists, philosophers, poets musicians and adventurers to further his fanatical curiosity. He could play twenty or thirty instruments. He concocted new cures for illnesses, he smelted rare metals and used them in the construction of strange mechanical machines, he mapped the heavens and developed further ancient astronomical knowledge of the way that constellations affected the affairs of humankind. He was skilled with weapons and fought with the best, enjoying the physical respite from the intellectual storms that shook him. In short he was a an all round genius, brilliantly perceptive and probably having more effect than any other single scholar on the history of humanity. In his lifetime he fathered several dozen children because he had developed a theory that a genius had a responsibility to make his blood available to humankind, given his rudimentary sense of how hereditary factors affect human progeny. Hadn’t he received his father’s language skills and his mother’s musical abilities and his grandfather’s astrological prowess?  He was utterly apolitical, feeling that the leaders of peoples were generally of low intelligence, ignorant of everything that was important in life. He lived to a ripe old age, around a hundred and twenty years, influencing great thinkers and, in his last decade, conducting experimentation on life after death. Was he successful? All I can say is that he succeeded in getting me to write about him, anonymous though he might still be. And how could that happen?

www.azimuthtrilogy.com

(Azimuth by Jack Sanger also in Kindle books at Amazon)

All works by this author at www.chronometerpublications.me

Minor Keys No. 10

The last character to catch my eye in Azimuth, The First Journey, is revealed briefly in the following action and dialogue. Again, a minor individual, meriting just a few lines of prose, is actually a prime mover in a grand narrative. In philosophical terms, you and I are here today because of a ludicrously cosmic series of events. From the Big Bang (if that was the very beginning) to today, the billions of years of what may be termed fate (something the Magus must grapple with in his journey towards understanding) has led to this point in time when I write and you read. Each of us is the product of an almost infinite number of forces, changes and twists of fortune, genes, happenstance and serendipity from amoebic life to the complexity with which we are now endowed. Even as you read this you are in constant change and so am I. So, in a narrative such as Azimuth, a character’s acts before the book begins is just another perturbation of the surface of the ocean of fate, yet the book was written with some kind of implicit recognition of prior events. That is in the nature of all narratives, is it not? We never write from ground zero. Our first words contain assumptions of what went before. So here is the first reference to the individual at the centre of this blog.

Gradually, one after another placed a hand on his heart with the other offered towards the Warrior, palm stretched out and turned up. Except one. The Warrior saw him without moving his eyes. The man was standing at the edge of the circle, drawing a bow. Yet, even as he did so, there was a whistle of a knife, the sound as it struck the man’s body and the sight of him falling to the ground. The bewilderment for all was that no-one could tell who had thrown the knife. The three on horseback had seemed not to move, nor had the six behind them and yet the knife had impaled the man’s chest. One of them must have thrown it.

-Who was he? called the Warrior, eyes probing the crowd.

I am not going to give the answer to the Warrior’s question here. It will spoil the narrative. Instead, let us go back in time to that point (a bit like the Shire in Lord of the Rings) when everything in the valleys was rosy. In one valley a girl is born and in the next valley a boy, younger brother to the rapist-heir to the chief. All their lives become extraordinarily intertwined later but at the moment they are separate. They know of each other via their clans but do not meet. Azimuth contains much information about the girl’s eventual life but elder and younger boy remain ciphers to be partially broken at the very end of the first book. The younger sibling idolizes his oldest brother. From a baby, just able to crawl he follows him around, despite being occasionally harshly treated. When their mother dies, their father has little time for all except his heir, the eldest son. There are no women left who are related by blood to raise them and so the clan chief decrees that his fourth wife, known by all as ‘the witch’ because of her tendency to curse anyone who stands in her way, to make spells and to attempt the healing of those inhabited by spirits – not very successfully. The younger boy becomes wilder and more ill-disciplined, seeming to try to elicit his eldest brother’s love through more and more bizarre acts to gain his attention. Though this does not succeed, he is, nevertheless, accompanied by his brother on escapades where he commits acts both lewd and felonious while his brother watches in amusement from a distance. When the eldest takes a first wife to maintain the blood line, he hitches to the woman’s sister whom he treats disgracefully. He becomes increasingly bitter and falls out of favour with everyone in his clan, save that of the beloved brother to whom he is a useful tool and accomplice. His one arena of excellence is archery, for which he is universally praised. It is an irony that this single métier should be the cause of his ultimate downfall.

www.azimuthtrilogy.com

(Azimuth by Jack Sanger also in Kindle books at Amazon)

All works by this author at www.chronometerpublications.me

Minor Keys No.9

Late on in the first book, the Magus, now beginning to really question his role as a warrior who kills, sets out a strategy to encourage villagers to protect themselves. He teaches the art of bow making and offers a reward to the best bow-maker;

-Who made this? No-one stepped forward, -I repeat, who made this? It has a balance that sets it apart. A girl, new to womanhood, stepped forward. Some men allowed their indignation to show.

-I did not speak at first for I thought you were about to mock me.

He smiled at her, -It has a special quality. He took an arrow and notched it. When he released it, it flew over the heads of the circle of watchers and embedded itself in the centre of a tree. He spoke loudly, -She found wood such as we brought back for drying. She has cut it well so that the balance graces the hand. It is small but carries the power of many a larger weapon. He gave it back to her and offered her one of his arrows. She aimed at the same tree and the missile struck it just below his own. There was a shout of approval from the villagers so that her face reddened.

-You have a choice of reward, he said, -I have face colourings from alchemists far away in the east or a bow maker’s knife, crafted by metal workers in the City in the Mountain.

-I will take the knife! 

There are many instances in the Azimuth trilogy where women’s roles are questioned and plenty where women’s traditional roles are reversed. It is one of the pleasures of writing that you can question current mores and, being a management consultant for so long, in this case explore the ‘glass ceiling’ preventing women’s advancement in allegorical forms. The Magus has now developed a consciousness where he sees no difference in the capabilities of men and women in many arenas and insists upon their equality therein. As you can see, a warrior female from a peasant background creates cognitive dissonance among her male peers.

So why was she so different? And what happened to her after the Magus left the village? I suspect the following is true. She was secretive and somewhat androgynous, if not in physical attributes, at least in her psychology. From a child she harboured both female and male aspirations. She wanted to be a mother but she did not want the skivvy drudgery of being the marital slave of a village man. She did not like the boys, nor the men around her, including her father whom she had to avoid because of his prying eyes and obvious intent. She would take herself off into the fields and practise physical movements which, she imagined, would serve her well in battle. She stole a knife from a boy bully and learned to throw it with accuracy despite it being not constructed for this purpose. A little while before the Magus came to save the village from mercenary soldiers her father trapped her in her bed. In an instant her knife was at his throat, making a neat superficial incision. She enjoyed his jabbering apologies as he fell off her and then stumbled out into the darkness. Her mother scolded her saying that a daughter was her father’s first to take and her husband’s second, everyone knew that.

As happened to many who were affected by the Magus’ calm, unemotional convictions about respect and harmony, she resolved to leave the village and seek her future elsewhere. Her story had a happy ending unlike so many recounted in these ‘extra pages’ of Azimuth. She came across a merchant who travelled with a small band of guards to bring chinaware from the south in exchange for northern mountain wool. Her female nature meant that she could dress as his wife and enter the halls of the rich where his armed guards could not accompany him. On the occasion that would have brought his death, her knife throwing saved his life. His smouldering interest in her blew up into a raging flame and he pleaded with her to become his third wife. She agreed and became his favourite from that day on. She taught her children, three girls, the arts of knife and bow and then her grandchildren.

www.azimuthtrilogy.com

(Azimuth by Jack Sanger also in Kindle books at Amazon)

All works by this author at www.chronometerpublications.me

Minor Keys No. 8

I came across a minor character towards the end of the first book of Azimuth and realized I could have made him the first to occupy my pen since he appears early in the first chapter. He is Sabiya’s most loyal guard. You cannot imagine him turning on her like Indira Ghandi’s assassin or any hit man in history who has wormed his way into the confidence of a ruler. We first meet him in the section below:

The door swung open, an enormous armed guard peered at him and then stood aside to allow the Princess to enter. She was too slim to be beautiful to Kamil’s eye and too tall for all but a royal family member. Her black skin revealed her father’s predilection for Ethiopia. Her eyes were a glittering blue set wide apart above the family’s long shallow nose. Her rich plump red lips pouted at him.

Characters write themselves on to the page and once there create a tiny vortex which has minute but inevitable effects upon the storyline, the equivalent of the beat of a butterfly’s wing. They may take no greater part than opening doors and hanging around like any minder but the fact that they are there is always significjust ant. Why? Because, for example in this case, any jeopardy that envelops Sabiya must be written to take account of her faithful mastiff of a guard, having established his perpetual presence.

I like this fellow. It is deep seated and probably goes back to the playground years. Big, muscular boys who can crush you and your spirit are potent. If they are kindly then all and sundry love them because all and sundry realize that with the flip of a psychological coin the world could have gone dark.

He was such a boy, ragged robed and genial, doing extremes of manual labour long before he was a man. He was often seen pulling his plump child of a mother in a cart, shepherding his four sisters through the market or taking on all challengers in weightlifting sheep and calves. The Emperor Haidar saw him one day, with a sheep under each arm, laughing uproariously in his deep baritone and marked him as a likely guard for his baby daughter, Sabiya. He paid his mother for him and put him in his military training camp where early attempts to bully him were met with many ringing skulls. He could not be daunted by man or weapon and was soon installed on a pallet in a tiny chamber close to the little girl. He was her favourite after her doll Walidah, doubling as crawling mount and giant protector. As Kamil discovered, even as a precocious girl, Princess Sabiya had a maturity about sexual needs and she arranged a search party to bring her loyal defender the perfect young woman from a village on the lap of the sacred mountain. This robust creature was given a house near the outer palace walls and he was allowed to visit her when Sabiya was safe in her father’s company. Many children ensued, fast upon another.

In spite of his repetitive opening and closing of doors and general baleful, roving gaze for anything untoward in the vicinity of the Princess he remained a constant feature in her life, so much so he often seemed to disappear from view, despite his enormous frame. But even this consistency, as predictable as sun and moon, was to fracture in the flow of impassive Fate.

But for that you must read Azimuth.

www.azimuthtrilogy.com

(Azimuth by Jack Sanger also in Kindle books at Amazon)

All works by this author at www.chronometerpublications.me

Minor Keys No. 7

Sometimes characters in books have no description to make them physical entities in the mind’s eye yet they still provide volition to a narrative. One such is an envoy in a city where the Magus agrees to protect a young princess from assassination. There is a deadline, for the attempt on her life must take place within 24 hours of the first sign of her first menstruation. The envoy reveals much about this time of wandering warriors when he pleads that the Magus should accede to his queen’s request for protection, as follows:

-She wishes to entertain you. You are a great warrior and have magical powers. A shaman. Such men are rare.

-Such men may not exist at all except in the minds of the gullible.

-Yet you are such. There are many tales about you. How you wield an invincible sword. How you can throw a knife with the deadly accuracy of God’s blessing. How you can cure kings. How you speak with your horses as easily as with people. These stories are true?

-These are just stories. Is there a face in the moon?

-Some can see it.

   -That is my point.

One of the central themes of Azimuth is how a moral code comes into existence and becomes the basis for civilized social life. Today, in film particularly, whether we are talking about Kurosawa or Tarantino or manga comics, I feel the popularity of the genre owes much to modern warfare's anonymity, the political indifference to civilian death or, indeed, the death of the young men sent by politicians to kill for their country. Samurai codes and behaviours represent a return to a time of face to face mortal combat on a human rather than inhuman scale. Whether we have blood lust or are pacifists, it is far more comprehensible than a military drone.

Anyway, in the envoy’s words above the mystique of a warrior’s skills are revealed.

So what kind of man is this young fellow? He must have been born of parents loyal to the throne and with the income of at least the semi-skilled. As soon as he is able he runs errands for all the nobility. He is good natured and with a quick smile and generally trusted for he learns to say nothing of his go-between activities, some of which border upon deception and unfaithfulness. The queen likes his looks as he enters manhood and ties him to her with gifts and social elevation. He even stands outside her chambers and tries to shut his ears to her moans beneath the thrusting noble thighs of courtiers.

Meeting the Magus, even for this brief few seconds, stirs in him the desire to emulate and when the iconic stranger has gone, he also leaves in order to find fortune and skill with the blade. He finally finds a sword school led by a retired mercenary of some repute who does not feature in the pages of Azimuth, though his roguish exploits would have been worthy of Kamil’s inclusion. He does well and establishes himself as a leading apprentice here but, as with so many young men enamoured with fantasies of personal invulnerability he is killed in face to face battle with a man from the east, a man who is seeking out the Magus to add him to the list of his victims thus adding lustre to his growing infamy as a feared assassin.

You can find details of Azimuth at www.azimuthtrilogy.com 

This and my other books can also be found at www.chronometerpublications.me

Minor Keys No. 6

The next characters momentarily to cross the pages of Azimuth are the Spice Traders. They make me think of Fellini’s Satyricon, strange creatures that inhabit the margins of social life. Given that Azimuth is an arterial river of a book, fast flowing and dangerous enough for the intrepid adventurer on the surface but with depths to satisfy the seeker of hidden treasures, minor characters can bring jeopardy and unexpected insight in equal measure. This is how the women are introduced:

He and the girl permitted themselves to be seen at some distance. The richly coloured robes of the two caught and shimmered in the sun. They were both women as like each other as two fruit from the same branch. He tried to restrain the hope in his mind. They each rode a horse and towed a mule. The horses were wiry mountain beasts. The women themselves were tiny with facial features unlike any he had seen before; moon-like, angle eyed and with unblemished skin faintly greened by colouring powder and shaded by wide-brimmed hats. Their hands were gloved.

At this point in their own great adventure, the Magus and a small girl he has saved from a child abductor come across the spice traders selling their wares on the endless trail which runs across the great continents, east to west. The hope he feels in the extract above is that they will take the child off his hands. The women, though occupying little space in the grand design of the Azimuth trilogy, nevertheless have a much significance in the development of the Magus’ thought about life’s purpose. They pass on to him a small fraction of the wisdom they have acquired in their ceaseless travelling.

I expect, in the fifty or so years of their lives they endured extraordinary privations, abuse as well as the degree of idolization which was usually afforded exotic travelers passing through the isolated and culturally insulated villages of that time. Born twins, within a minute of each other, they brought good fortune to their parents for a while, being heralded as having occult powers owing to their ability to speak in seamless sentences, beginning and finishing each other’s words, their telepathy and the gift they quickly developed for cosmetics.  They cut hair, dyed it, painted faces for weddings and other festivals and gave advice on jewelry and other accessories. But, as so often happened to money spinners of this sort, they were abducted and made to work for the owner of a caravan train before they had reached their first blood shows. On a night when storms the like of which had never been seen brought violent rain, frogs and fish falling from the skies and a burning light that crossed the heavens to plunge into the earth close by, they took advantage of the fearful disarray to lead two frightened horses away from the chaos and into the battering darkness. Thus began their nomadic life. Befriended and protected by horse traders they travelled across great steppes, learning at first to trade by gathering plants and soils to make paints, creams, ointments and medicines. After years of journeying from east to west and back again they gained more wealth by buying and selling herbs and spices common to certain places but rare in others. They gave their bodies  happily to the horse herders as payment for their peace of mind but never conceived children, having ways of preventing it, as well as ways of ensuring their bodies remained free of disease. Finally they travelled alone being older and less in demand for their bodies. The terrible acts that were perpetrated on them prior to being saved by he Magus did not break their wills. Their lives remained in constant movement with an empathic sharing of the wisdom they gained regarding people, gods and nature. It was as if this was sufficient Purpose for them. When, by mutual consent they felt that enough was enough and no further knowledge might be gained on their travels, they stepped off a cliff together, hand in hand, carrying their wisdom with them and smiling in exultation.

www.azimuthtrilogy.com

(Azimuth by Jack Sanger also in Kindle books at Amazon)

All works by this author at www.chronometerpublications.me

Minor Keys No. 5

A tiny character (in every sense of the word) that next catches my eye in Azimuth is the girl who works in the brothel that the rather staid and portly librarian, Kamil, visits. Nothing much is said about her, even in inference – save that she appears conditioned by the culture of prostitution so that she has no moral perspective on its practices. Here’s a snippet from her short visitation to Azimuth’s pages.

The young girl stood before him, -You wish Madame Aidah to entertain you? He shook his head, asked her to bring him iced water and mopped his brow. He would have liked to throw off his cloak such was the heat in the room. She brought it, -You want another lady? Young? Older? Connoisseur? Her accent was from further to the east.

   -I would like to speak with the mistress.

-She not for sale.

-I do not wish to buy her ... her services. I need to talk with her. The girl stared at him unmoving, -Go! She turned perplexed as though she felt she had misunderstood his request. Time passed.

Reading it now brings home to me (oft discussed in my blogs about writing that precede the current run, is that the idea of the girl may well have been planted in my mind by a film I saw some twenty to thirty years ago, Pretty Baby by Louis Malle. If I remember it clearly, the film was controversial because of the depiction of a girl in a brothel. Whether the similarity ends there is for others to decide.  In Azimuth she appears to wait on tables and run errands. There is no information regarding what else she might do.

I understand (now I interrogate my imagination) that she’s pre or early teenage. She is the daughter of a prostitute who once worked for Baligha, the Mistress of the House of Senses, who had to take her as a ward owing to the following circumstances. Her mother, a slip of a young thing herself, failed to take the precautions of that time demanded by Baligha of all her courtesans, either before sex or after with one partner. She had become obsessed with a young noble who marked her out for his sole ministrations. She was narrow hipped and frail, so much so that despite medical help she died in the last hourse of pregnancy and the child had to be cut from her body by the distraught and guilty Baligha. As a baby, toddler and young child she was mothered by all the prostitutes. They followed a code laid down by their Mistress that the girl should not be witness to any unseemly act though it was impossible to stay her curiosity about the work that they all did. By the time we meet her in Azimuth, she is on the cusp between innocence and experience. But what happened to her later, after Kamil had constructed his Tales of the Magus?

In effect Baligha groomed her to manage the brothel while inculcating in her a sense of obstinate pride in her virginity. By the time Baligha gave up her ownership of that lucrative business, the girl was in her twenties and was protected by her own guard of loyal, honest swordsmen. Her fame spread across the empire and it was natural that young men fell for the allure of her virginity and beauty in this place of famed and highly skilled sex goddesses. Curiously, she never married nor lost her maidenhead but, when she retired and passed on the business to another, a little like herself, wrote an autobiography of her times with frank and quite explicit details of the desires of men and how women might satisfy them without ever losing their dignity and sacred sense of their bodies.

A single poem survives from her writing:

O callous phallus you prey in red the maidenhead

But know that tenderness in ingress helps virgins burgeon

www.azimuthtrilogy.com

(Azimuth by Jack Sanger also in Kindle books at Amazon)

All works by this author at www.chronometerpublications.me

Minor Keys No. 4

The barber stepped forward nonchalantly, his attendant following with a tray of combs, razors, scissors, brushes, oils and hot water. Kamil sat while a towel was placed around his shoulders. The man was quick and sure. His face moved round Kamil’s, close enough for him to see the coarse skin filled to smoothness with stiff cream and smell the unguents that had been massaged into the cheeks. Following the cutting and shaving, similar fragrant oils were applied to him.

We are at a point in the ‘framing’ narrative in Azimuth where Kamil the historian has been revealed as only 41 and Princess Sabiya pretends to be perturbed that he might have base sexual fantasies about her. She has seen him thus far as a decade older and more like a grandfather. In her coquettish way she decides to spruce him up. Hence the barber in the extract above.

Who is this barber and why has he appeared in the narrative? Part of my novelist’s brain seems to have been working autonomously on the backcloth to the main stories in Azimuth. Many readers have loved the visual nature of the book and being transported to a recognisable yet alien world and, I suppose, it is through a minor character like the barber that so much is said about court life in a few literary daubs.

Unlike the physician the barber is the latest in a long line of his profession in the court. His name in the language of the day meant ‘son of my father the barber’. Even when just able to wield a pair of scissors, a comb and a shaving razor he was given coconuts to shave, shredded linen balls to cut and a donkey’s mane to groom. Living within the grounds of the outer walls of the palace meant that he was privileged to a degree. Despite his homosexual certainties he followed the dictates of his blood and produced enough sons to ensure that one, at least, extended the barber line. His wife took lovers from among other similar professions in the royal household as was the accepted way. As he grew older, the barber maintained his sexual interest in boys about to become men. Built in to his behaviour, a sort of genetic engineering, was the capacity to be silent in the company of royals, obsequious in body language but rarely in word. He was proud of his skills and though much disliked in the main by his aristocratic masters he was indispensable to their vanities. And this is how he lived and died, never challenging those above him, autocratic to those below, enjoying young flesh while secretly loathing the ageing skins upon which he mainly worked.

www.azimuthtrilogy.com

www.chronometerpublications.me

Minor Keys No. 3

Our next minor character is the physician who tends the king in the City of White Stones (I turned the pages of Azimuth Book 1, just a moment ago and this character caught my eye – thus, I am going to write about him as a stream of consciousness now and see where we get.) It is here that the young Magus’ inherent power to heal first comes to the fore as he and his father are drawn to the court of the city. It is also one of the earliest examples of CSI in human history! The boy examines the king’s wound, the result of an arrow strike.

-The tip in your husband’s body has been sawn from a poisoned hunting arrow, he told the queen,  -The kind of arrow which is used to slow the death of wild beasts. The shaft you can see here has no clean break. The royal physician removed its metal head and then inserted the tip of a corrupted hunting arrow in its place. Your husband would have recovered quickly enough from his wound had it not been for the introduction of the poison. This man chose his venom carefully to allay suspicion. The shaft would have been thrown away and no-one would have suspected him by the time the king died. If another physician had investigated his body it would have been unlikely that he would find such a small tip. If he did then it would have been seen as an understandable oversight on the part of the doctor.

What happens next with regard to the royal physician you will have to read for yourself. Remember that Azimuth is a trilogy with serious intent, despite its being cloaked in fable and adventure. It is a discourse on philosophy and religion, too and people’s search for meaning in their lives.

So, to the physician!

He began medicine as did most at that time. His family were not well-to-do, surviving on low level trade, buying and selling corn and other staple crops. Wanting something better for their eldest son they paid for him to become a physician’s apprentice. He had an aptitude and did well. He was ambitious and managed to hide it under a generally fawning exterior which helped him develop his own clientele. After many years he was approached by blood relatives of the king who wanted to supplant him as ruler and within a short time the king’s old physician disappeared mysteriously on an errand to save the life of a nearby noble. He now became a mole in the court but was instructed to do nothing by his secret employers but ingratiate himself with the royal couple and after some time became trusted. All the while his wealth increased, his patients being attracted from a richer stratum and he tended to the king and queen in a most proper manner. He built a most admirable house, enjoying the advice of the king’s architect, married well and had five children. He was a key figure in the temple and was seen to pray longer and harder than any other, always making lavish gifts to the god of that city. No-one suspected that he was the cause of royal still births nor his judgment that the queen suffered from an imbalance of elements in her womb that could not be remedied. Satisfied that there could be no competing heir to the throne, his fellow conspirators finally moved to act and it is at this point that the young Magus and his father became instrumental in the events above described.

So there we are. The physician. Funny business writing isn’t it? All the while you are telling your tale you are excluding strands in your imagination which you might otherwise follow because there are more important characters developing and choking page space!

www.azimuthtrilogy.co

www.chronometerpublications.me

Minor Keys No. 2

So, the first significant minor character we meet in Azimuth is the High Priestess who is the first woman to influence the thinking of the young Magus. It is she who drugs him, changes him momentarily into a woman to give him the experience of motherhood and the realization that the world he inhabits is dominated by male power. She only appears on a couple of pages in Azimuth and she is described by the boy’s father as follows:

They were lying on their beds. The night candle spluttered, offering an intermittent yellow light.

-What is she?

-The wisest, noblest woman you will ever meet. A true shaman.

-What does she…? He couldn’t think what he was asking.

-It is best to think of her as a high priestess but one who has no god of her own. She offers wisdom to those who come to her. For many she is the difference between joy and despair. But for others she is someone to hate. It is only because she is protected by the ruler of this territory that they have not moved against her.

-How can anyone hate her?

-They have their gods.

-For that?

-For her all true gods are of the same essence. She says that a true god is a conduit for love. Some choose gods of war, some vengeance and some the oppression of the poor. These are many kinds of gods. Not all are true.

 -This is obvious.

- It is. But men who seek to have power over others choose their gods carefully. She says that they make gods out of their own tribal histories to justify their futures.

-I have no sense of any god, said the youth.

I sense now that this female pope is ageless, one of those individuals in a generation who has had an uncanny wisdom since birth such that she learned quickly how to manage her parents demands. She left her family in the night when she was fifteen to follow a burning inner directive and travelled, disguising her femininity, to places where holy men and women gathered willing crowds around them. In these arenas her questions confounded with their sharp insights but as soon as the credulous supplicants tried to install her as their new seer, she left again. She took lovers. She learned the relationship between gold and men’s hearts and their chosen deities. With ease she used her powers to establish herself, protected by a Lord who venerated her wisdom, in a modest palace filled with aesthetic artifacts brought to her as gifts by those seeking her counsel. Here she became a kind of oracle, a pre-Sufi intent on supporting and developing all that is good in the hearts of humankind whether practical or spiritual. She favoured no one god.

After the events involving her meeting the young Magus in Azimuth she continued her benevolent work until the army of a despot ravaged the land and took the Lord prisoner. Refusing to flee she was imprisoned in a cave and became an anchorite but the despot dared not kill her for all knew of her power to change the path of fate. Here she remained until she died, meditating on goodness and aware that every thought to that end was a breath in the wind that battled with the storms of evil. Her thoughts reached out to untold numbers of seekers of truth who assumed they were of their own making, unaware of her existence.

www.azimuthtrilogy.com

www.chronometerpublications.me

Minor keys No. 1

I thought I would take a break from writing directly about writing. 50 blogs is quite sufficient for the moment and they are all there for the interested reader. What I intend to take their place results from the comment of a keen follower of Azimuth who, a bit like the fanatical fan of the writer in Misery (no, it can’t happen to me, can it? I’ll just hide the sledgehammer!) was distressed at the end of the trilogy not to know what happened to the half-humans once the book had ended. “I love them,” she said. “They are real.” Now these magnificent seven adventurers may still be living in the cosmos. I may have created them or they may have made me create them but the fact is that they go on existing albeit in some pure thought form. This not such a bizarre concept. Indeed I saw a documentary asking serious questions about the basic quantum force of the universe and ‘thought’ was one hypothesis. Just as in The Matrix films it is posited that we are all actually a few lines of clever code in a vast computer program (again some scientists posit this as a strong possibility to explain present human reality) the characters that authors create may also live on after the last page of a novel in another medium. Rather a charming notion if we look back over great literature, don’t you think? Anna Karenina enjoying ethereal conversations with Hamlet and Bilbo Baggins. In this alternative universe all the characters every author has created, don’t die but exist in an ‘elsewhere’. The notion that minor characters in novels and plays have been unjustly marginalized by authors is not so new. Immediately I think of Six Characters in Search of an Author by Pirandello or Rozencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead by Tom Stoppard. The conceit in these and other literary artefacts is that we, the readers, are desperate to know more biographical detail about them than the author allows or even knows.

Since Azimuth contains dozens of minor characters, there could be plenty to write about. It will encourage me to go into a channeling state, like a batty medium, and make contact with them again. One knock yes, two knocks no. My encounters with them might entertain you and at the same time lead you to buy the core material, Azimuth the Trilogy. I can’t be more frank, can I? This is marketing but not as you know it, Captain. Tune in for the first minor character’s extended life tomorrow.

www.azimuthtrilogy.com

www.chronometerpublications.me

The Art of Writing No. 50

I suspect that writing is changing and I don’t mean the usual changes that occur over time such as the treatment of taboo subjects or social observation or Joycean playfulness with words. The coming generations will not be wedded to the printed word or screen-based text in quite the way I was for most of my life. Their world is technologically different, they carry communication to the entire world in their pockets, they are receivers of visual stimuli constantly, they are interactive…

I remember running a research project many years ago (the book of the project is advertised on www.chronometerpublications.me) which was one of the earliest forays into the experience of children with video games and computers. Already there was the generational rift between the child and the luddite parent which these days is exacerbated by computer-based social media like Facebook and Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn and Friends Reunited. At the bottom end of the generational ladder users’ speed at managing the world of apps, fast tracks them beyond the ossifying brains of their elders. Now I am not up to date with any of it but I would still surmise that the plastic brain we all have (more amenable to learning the younger we are) is forming new ways of seeing and interpreting the world, influenced and even conditioned by these new technologies. Questions we dealt with on the British Board of Film Classification’s Children’s Advisory panel are even more relevant. Are people more likely to commit anti-social acts if they play video games constantly? Are the young finding it more difficult to distinguish the virtual from the real? Has everything got to be sound-byte size? What technology will be in our pockets or chip implanted brains in ten years?

For a long time a rattling good tale will still carry sway over readers BUT getting them to the book in the first place is the question. Even an e-book. Somehow we may need to be more innovative in our very presentation, syntax and lexicons to draw them in and appease their critical disinterest in the word. We may have to package how we write as well as what we write to fit the smart phone user. Some time ago Umberto Ecco made the point that people read in paragraphs now, hardly bothering to step heavily from sentence to sentence. Long books (Alas poor Azimuth!) may be too far off the radar of the young. They may need to be presented like a Dickens novel, in serial byte form though, I believe, various attempts to do this have met with mixed success. As writers we are in competition with so many media, vying for windows in the technological time of our customers.

Whilst I, as a novelist, try to be innovative, I can no longer stay at the bow wave of innovation (if I ever could!). All I can do is write more visually, borrow tricks from mould-breaking films and seek plotlines to illuminate the existential dilemmas that face oncoming generations as they grapple with human identity in a universe which conflates flesh and blood with pixilated other realities.

www.chronomterpublications.me