My kingdom for a theme (Part II)

One thing I've noticed about my newly discovered themes is that they're all focused on individual characters' choices, failures, triumphs, relationships, and growth. But while reading Kate Elliott's blog the other day, in which she linked to a guest blog entry she'd written for John Scalzi, I discovered that some of her themes are, well, bigger than my themes. Her most recent series addresses:


"...how injustice manifests in a society and how people combat it; how corruption creates and intensifies and reinforces injustice. Who needs a dark lord when people are themselves capable of manifold cruelties? And what gives people the strength to resist corruption and to fight injustice even at the cost of their own lives?"



This inspired another panic attack over a perceived inadequacy (milder panic, this time; just a few sputtering fuses and hissing wires). Should I have bigger themes, more important themes? Collapsing empires? Doomsday devices? World war?


But truth to tell -- I'm not writing about societies in conflict and grand power struggles and corrupt governments. Not yet anyway. The characters in this volume may feel the first tremors of cultural change and societal upheaval--the ripplings under the crust, the roiling threat of a storm on the horizon--and they are in some cases even the instigators of such rumblings. But I'm telling the story from the inside out, from the POV of the pebbles that, mostly unknowlingly, trigger the avalanche. The avalanche itself is for later.

So (reassured) I present my second thematic couplet:

Parent vs Child

Ironically, I first began writing at least in part as an antidote to the demands and responsibilities of parenthood. I needed an imaginary universe to escape to. Books could only go so far in fulfilling that need; I found I wanted to create and inhabit a world where I was in control (ha), where all the conflicts did not revolve around mealtimes, bedtimes, and homework, where everyone did what I told them to (ha, ha). And so the world I designed would have (ha, ha, ha) very little to do with parenting and children.


But being a parent has been my life for the last 21 years, 2 months, and 23 days. It's one of the most important things I do in life. Given that, it was inevitable that parent/child dynamics should muscle their way into the story. This theme has flexed itself everywhere, including Saree's obsession with her royal son, Miren's devotion to her children, Darric's unusual relationship with his grandfather, the struggle between Riordan and his father, fraught with secrets--


With the fire gone, the only light filtered down from the smoke hole, a paler shade of darkness. His father's form was barely visible, grayish and amorphous. "Tarra would have wanted you to find the woman you called."

"And what do you want?" Riordan asked.

A pause. "A son who will be strong where I was not, who will follow the path of honor no matter the cost."

"You have one. But you're casting him away."

"Don't be a fool. I am setting him free."

"From the Shirin's cage? Or yours?"

Egon turned his face away. "Leave now." His voice was as brittle as a dead leaf, ready to crumble at the slightest pressure. "While I still have the will to let you fly away."

--and Yakoba and his father's mutual disownment of each other, not to mention his own uneasiness with the concept of fatherhood--

"What is your name?" he said to distract her. He had no liking for weeping children, and he could guess well enough what was happening to her mother: the slow but inevitable wasting away that befell all women the Kadyr used as vessels. Though if he was right about the child's age, her mother had lasted far longer than most.

She sniffed loudly and wiped a hand across her nose. "Jona."

"Why did you go looking for me?"

"You called me. Don't you remember?"

He started to say no, but then memories crowded in, whole and bright, as though shutters had been thrown open in a dark room. He had dreamed of her before, several times. Most recently, on the journey south—when he had managed to chase Elyse out of his dreams, this child had wandered in, an ethereal, flickering presence that he could never quite capture.

Something bound them to one another. For a moment he could not fathom what, and then he knew. He reached out and trailed his fingers along her cheek, touched his thumb to her soft, damp, beautiful mouth. Familiar, yes—because she was born of his seed.

In the ten years he had been a practicing master, he had sired untold numbers of children. Some may have died in infancy, but others would no doubt grow to adulthood, to be harvested, one way or another, by the Kadyr. It was not his business to find them or know them, only to make them. Nor, he knew with inexplicable certainty, had he ever dreamed of other offspring. Only this girl.

An unsettling emotion grew in his breast, one that pricked him queerly. He watched her nudge another stone into place, a deep blue one, like a piece of twilight sky flecked with golden stars. No mere stray rock, that, but a smooth oval of lapis worthy of gracing the throat of a princess. "Where did you get that stone?"

"Mama gave it to me. She didn't want anyone to find it. She gave me this one, too." She dug into a pocket and produced a small white pebble. "It's not pretty, but I like it best. I sleep with it." She darted a look at him that was part defiance and part wariness, as if she expected to be scolded for such nonsense.

"May I hold it for a moment?" he asked. "I'll give it back, I promise."

She hesitated, then held it out.

He took it and rolled it into his palm. It was about the size of his thumbnail and irregular, with a cloudy translucence. Zared might consider the girl a treasure—and she was, in deeper ways than some self-proclaimed jarai thieflord could possibly fathom—but this nodule, even unshaped and uncut, could buy a dozen small girls. He had once possessed a similar stone, though he had traded it for something of greater value to him: the blue sapphire that had proclaimed him a Master of the Kadyr. "This is a very special stone. You mustn't ever lose it." He dropped the rough diamond in her hand and she wrapped her fingers around it.

"I always know where it is," she answered, and something in the way she said it made him look at her sharply. Diamonds were rarely taken as lu'tsahs, being complex, difficult, even dangerous gems. For such a bond to be made by one who was years away from her awakening was nothing short of astounding.

The girl stared at her designs in the dirt, frowning a bit. After a moment she laid a tiny pink clam shell into the pattern. "Kal gave this shell to me. She says she got it from a place where the water is bigger than the sky and huge boats with wings fly on it. I want to fly on one of those boats. Have you seen them?"

"I've sailed on ships." And now he had returned from his latest voyage, with a report to make to the Elder, a red-headed woman to claim, and, it seemed, a daughter to rescue.

"Kal says when I'm bigger I must leave Hazaar, or I'll be made into a concubine. Selki says a concubine has to—" She grimaced. "He's always horrid and he likes to hurt things. I hate him. And I don't want to be a concubine. It's nasty."

"You will not be a concubine."

"Then what will I be?"

He saw the shine of her hopes and dreams in her face and could not utter the bald truth, that she was destined to give her maidenskin and her gift to a Kadyr master, to bear his child and afterwards die.

"You will be my daughter," he said lamely.

Her smile lit the air. "And will we fly together on the ships?"

The smoldering coal of anger grew until it flamed like the sun, though he could not have said why it burned so hot.

"I don't know," he answered, and left the dream.

.......

The boy was silent a long moment. Fire blew through Kauldi's encampment. Shadows moved there now, men running frantically, their shouts carrying faintly up the mountain.

"All right," he said at last. "Though how you will persuade my father to give you the child, I don't know."

"If he does not miss his own son who goes trading in the wilderness, he will not miss one small girl who plays with stones," Yakoba said.

"Who said he doesn't miss me?" He slanted an enigmatic glance up at Yakoba. "My father is a dangerous man."

"So," Yakoba observed, "is his son."

In the soft golden backwash from the fire below, Yakoba saw the boy's teeth bared in a brief but ferocious grin. "Always remember that." He settled the wraithcat fur more securely on his shoulders and struck out through the trees, dodging low branches, his limping footfalls barely perceptible on fallen needles. His voice floated back, softly as if he spoke to himself, "Though I wonder what sort of man would deliver his own daughter to her death."

The words stung, though they shouldn't have. "A man with a duty."

The boy answered on a puff of laughter as biting as a winter wind. "I would have said a man without a soul."

My kingdom for a theme (Part I)

There's been a meme floating around some of my friends' blogs (well, it was floating around a couple months ago. It's probably sunk to the silty bottom of the blogosphere by now) called "Ten Things About Me as a Writer." I was halfway considering posting the thing here, just to have something to post. But then I stumbled over question #6 and fell flat on my smug writer's face.

It's a question about theme, as in, which one keeps cropping up in your work?

In a moment of cold, sweaty horror, I thought: Themes? Am I supposed to know what they are? Before I finish? How can I find them? What if there's more than one?

And what if there aren't any at all?

Well, eventually all the firecrackers of panic quit popping off, and in the silence I found the answer.


I do (thank goodness) have themes in my novel. But they are not what I thought they were, or rather, what I had begun the novel vaguely thinking they might be.


Back then, I assumed sacrificing everything for love was going to be a theme, but it isn't. The idea of sacrifice is there, but love is not the motivating factor. I also thought the story was going to be about overcoming prejudice, but it's not about that either, although the issues of prejudice and bigotry do crop up here and there.

No, when I started mining for themes, I discovered three major veins running through the strata of the story, sometimes bold and distinct, sometimes elusive, surfacing only in fitful gleams, but still traceable from start to finish -- or at least, as near to the finish as the story goes at this point. I also discovered that each theme is expressed as two contrasting concepts. I've always gravitated toward conflict in writing (well, pretty much stuffing as much in as the story will hold); I guess it shouldn't surprise me that even the themes embody conflict.

I thought I would discuss them in three separate posts. Here's the first and, I think, the main one.

Duty vs Desire.

The question of when duty (to law, family, culture, vows, or oneself) trumps desire (for love, sex, power, fame, or recognition), or vice versa, is one that plays out in numerous ways among the various plot threads. This theme is first introduced in an explicit way on the first page of the story:

On the day Riordan turned twenty-five, he awoke with the distinct feeling he had little time to lose. He had always considered himself an obedient son, but before the birds could launch their first sleepy twitters, he mounted his white mare and ghosted out of the Hawk clan's covey of dwellings. He journeyed downward, through forest and vale and a chill, misty darkness until he reached the great burial mound at the northern border. There he planned to defy both his father and the prophets his father so shamefully served.

He galloped the mare up to the mound's rounded crest, which normally offered sweeping views of the river and the Wall. Today a heavy mist webbed the land in a cocoon of secrecy, hiding the burgeoning dawn and guarding him from all eyes.

Which suited him admirably. He wanted no witnesses. The song of calling, besides being outlawed, was also a highly private affair.

After turning Shae loose to graze, he crouched in the tall grass and ripped out enough stalks to clear a small circle. In the patch of raw, black earth he laid a bed of stones and heaped on it thin curls of birch bark, followed by an array of sticks he had gleaned along the way: oak, for strength and longevity; willow, for resilience; dry pine, for the hot fire of passion. He arranged the wood precisely, without haste, though he'd be missed before long. The clans would arrive in strength today to witness the joining of the Hawk's son with the Raven's daughter. It was his duty to stand at his father's side and greet them, his duty to offer his bride the marriage knife, to shed her blood in the marriage bed.

But a man also owed allegiance to laws far more ancient and binding than a father's command, or—he firmly quashed visions of Moriana's troubling beauty—his own wayward desires. This was his final chance to call a wife in the oldest way, the sacred way—and forbidden since the Shirin had decreed it so. It was not the place of mystics and prophets to make such laws, but lately they gathered more authority to themselves than they ought, until they ruled even the King-Chief.

Riordan throws everything over for the sake of duty, but it's duty wrapped around another desire: the hunger to take charge of his own life, to break out of the cage his father, his culture, and history have put him in. The rebellion starts small but has huge consequences, one of which is that what was begun out of allegiance to an old tradition becomes itself an overwhelming desire, and in the end he will (I believe) once more have to make a choice between the two.

This same theme plays out elsewhere in the story in well, but particularly in the struggles of Yakoba, one of the main antagonists, who breaks a sacred oath to slake a desire, and in so doing unravels the fabric of everything he had convinced himself was right and true.

He led her to the throne of her power and displayed it for her. Fire was predominant, but she had something else that he had not detected in his previous, brief explorations. He glimpsed a shimmer of something crystalline, and with a small shock recognized it as one of the same gifts he carried within himself.

Stone.

It was a uniquely Tsuroi power and how it had come to be mixed into her Cuhlnari bloodline was an intriguing question.

"Oh!" she exclaimed. "I see it! A white flame, but hard inside, like a diamond—it's beautiful!"

It was indeed and her innocent joy in it made him suddenly and inexplicably regret the necessity of taking it from her—and the inevitable price she would pay.

Remorse was an emotion so alien and so unnerving that he withdrew his hand, sharply, as though something had scalded it. He ruthlessly examined the offending sentiment and realized it had arisen from the fact that he genuinely liked her. She was something more than mere woman-flesh primed to be a vessel for his seed and a vehicle for his pleasure. She was intelligent, honest, amusing, courageous—and highly gifted. She would make a fit mate for any prince of the tribes.

Even an outcast prince.

The thought was such an outrageous and diverting notion that he was lost for a moment in imagining its possibilities. They were very limited—he knew well enough that Valden of Illea would not sit by and permit his cousin, the current heir to a large and wealthy province, to be spirited away. Pursuit would be inevitable and he could not hope to out sail a war fleet.

Of more immediate importance, however, were the constraints laid on him by his duty. He could not marry—he had sworn an oath to make the rite his life's task and he was ever dutiful to his word. Unless…

He acted while reason still lagged, off-balance and bemused. "Turraya—look at me." He pulled his lu'tsah out of his shirt and slipped the cord over his head.

Her eyes flew open as she came back from her internal contemplations. He held out the cord with its blue stone dangling. "Here. Take this."

She made no move to touch it. "You're giving that to me?"

"For today only. It is—" He hesitated. His father had always said that truth-telling was a fine and subtle art—and about that one thing, at least, his father was right. "It is symbolic of a bond of trust between two people. A sharing between friends. If you were a woman of the tribes, you would have one of your own and could grant me that in exchange."

He looped it around her neck, though he already felt foolish offering it to her. Impulsiveness and sentimentality were as foreign to his nature as remorse. But it was done and he never did anything less than thoroughly. There were many other gifted women in the world, and with them he would gladly do what was required—but there was only one Elyse, and perhaps this transgression, this omission was not so great as to matter.

But matter it does, so greatly that it will change the course of his life and the lives of many others. And in the end, he will find he must sacrifice desire for duty, but he has more than one duty pulling at him. Which will he fulfill and at what cost?

The theme is also expressed in Moriana's sacrifice, choosing a horrifying duty in order to enact a desire for vengeance.

And Darric is a man torn between duty to his country and his prince, and the lure of a forbidden, and treasonous, liaison.

His thoughts prowled into perilous territory, and his heart beat swiftly as he recalled Rafe's words: Do what I raised you to do. Take what is yours.

And what exactly, Darric silently asked, is mine?

He watched his breath cloud the air, and surveyed the kingdoms on his mental playing board for the hundredth time: the Cuhlnari territory was a small wedge driven between Keldian-held Illea and the Great Horns—the Graystones, as Riordan had called the range. South of the mountains lay Hazaar, a land of glass and silk, spices and war hounds, and volatile politics. Westward over the sea, the Keldian empire sprawled like a well-fed lioness, temporarily sated but only a matter of time before she cast hungry eyes on Hazaar's riches.

And now Hazaar was busy with its own internal squabbles, its ports closed, all trade ceased. Whoever ruled the Cuhlnari would have access to the only land route, assuming there was one, to Hazaar. Whether that route would be used for trade or invasion remained to be seen, but the man who controlled it could name his own price and make his own rules. Valden knew this and considered it an easy matter to brush the Cuhlnari aside like dust before a broom and set up housekeeping on their land.

Darric knew it as well and contemplated the consequences born of a marriage between a Keldian yarl and the daughter of a Cuhlnari chieftain.

There were several, all of them treasonous. He was thankful that his musings were shielded from Valden.

"Planning an invasion?" Valden inquired softly.

Darric nearly bit his tongue as he jerked around. "What?"

The moonlight bleached the skin on Valden's face and cast deep shadows over his eyes, but Darric could feel them on him just the same.

The cultured voice continued, casual but with a honed edge: "You had this look on your face, just then, that reminded me of that mosaic in the Court of Nobles, of the seventh warrior sailing to conquer the Northern Heaven."

Darric forced a grin. "No invasion, but a campaign, to be sure. I was thinking about conquering a plate of roast venison and a chalice of fine wine, before retiring to a soft bed with the spoils of war."

Valden regarded him a moment, then said lightly, "No rewards at Teon, I'm afraid, at least of the beddable sort. But I'm sure you'll find something to your liking once we reach Krissea." He propped himself up on one elbow and his eyes gleamed briefly in the moonlight. "You must be feeling better than I thought, if you're thinking about women again."

He waved a hand at a nearby soldier, who hastened over with Valden's flask, newly refilled. The prince, with the gracious, self-deprecating air of a head cook offering selections for the evening's dining, said, "And speaking of which, you may choose either Raina of Norfall or the widow Ingria for your wife." He sipped from the flask and passed it to Darric. "Either one is suitable, though with Raina, you'll have to wait nearly a year until she comes of age. She's no beauty, but has the greater inheritance. What do you say?"

Darric took his time answering. Here it was at last, Valden's punishment of his renegade hound: distract him with a mate and chain him safely out of the way, far to the north where he could do no harm. Both women were heiresses to estates that bordered Darric's own—one on the west and the other to the south. To marry either one of them would expand his holdings—and his wealth—considerably. But then, to do what he already had been contemplating would expand them beyond anyone's expectations, particularly Valden's.

He drank liberally from the flask. The brandy, which was excellent, burned sweetly in his stomach and settled his ragged heartbeat. "I'll think on it."

"Don't think too long." Valden settled back in the cushions. "Choose one and get her pregnant. I need you married, with an heir on the way."

And too busy to make trouble for you.

Darric turned away to stare out onto a moon-washed landscape of pines and snowy hillsides, and thought of Moriana.

***