I shall be a felt windbreak
Dear friends,
I signed a contract this morning with Frivolous Comma: they’re going to publish my story “Closer than your kidneys” this summer! “Kidneys” is the story of a spacefaring assassin who finds herself falling in love with the princess who should have been her target. It’s full of grand gestures and crystal swords, though the princess (properly speaking, the khanym) has a ruthless practical streak.
“Kidneys” is in some sense the ancient history of my Nakharat stories–it’s the story of the way the Nakhorians chose to make a single planet their home in the first place. Among the story’s seeds are the loyalty oaths and betrayals of the thirteenth-century Secret History of the Mongols. For instance, one man promises Temüjin (who will become Genghis Khan):
I shall unite for you
Your scattered people. Just as
the place of the kidneys must be in the back,
That of good faith must be in the breast!
(I’m following Igor de Rachewiltz’s meticulously footnoted translation here.) Later, one of Temüjin’s friends tells him:
I shall be a black crow,
And with the others
I shall gather for you
All that is found outside…
In return, Temüjin tells his most loyal followers,
You two,
When I had no friend but my shadow,
Became my shadows.
Similarly, when he had no whip but his horse’s tail, they became his horse’s tail, a comparison less intuitive to the modern reader!
I was fascinated by the specificity of these various metaphors for standing at someone’s back. I found the references to kidneys, in addition to hearts, particularly memorable: when I was a feckless graduate student, I had a scary antibiotic-resistant kidney infection, so I’m inclined to take that part of the body seriously. Thus, when my assassin had to declare her newest, deepest loyalties, I let her invoke the kidneys first.
In other writing news, I recently reviewed Rebecca Fraimow’s forthcoming novella The Iron Children–this is a story that asks many questions about loyalty and survival, though its sympathies are most clearly with the importance of figuring out your ethics for yourself.
Gennoveus the cat is not much given to formal oaths of friendship, but I think we can trust in his goodwill.
Yours very sincerely,
Ursula.