Yesterdays battles, p.1
Yesterday's Battles, page 1
Copyright @ 2020 Jack Whyte
Iguana Books
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Front cover design: Meghan Behse
Cover image: Jack Whyte
Issued in print and electronic formats.
ISBN 978-1-77180-430-1 (paperback). 978-1-77180-431-8 (epub). 978-1-77180-432-5 (Kindle).
This is the original electronic edition of Yesterday’s Battles.
To Beverley
Foreword
For several years now, ever since my doctor advised me to forget about buying green bananas and put my affairs in order instead, I’ve been experimenting with short forms of fiction that, for years, I had left unexplored. I don’t know why that was. It may simply have been because my publishers, throughout the world, were predominantly top-tier, traditional houses that published “big” books. For upwards of two decades, then, on both sides of the millennium, I researched and wrote a string of hefty novels that included two trilogies and the four concluding novels of the nine-volume Arthurian cycle, set in Roman Britain in the late fourth and early fifth centuries, that is known in Canada as A Dream of Eagles and in the US as The Camulod Chronicles.
Then, faced suddenly in 2017 with the strong probability of imminent death, I was forced to choose between continuing to write as I had before—which would entail more years of research than I might be able to handle—or tackling another form of writing altogether, that indistinct, hazily defined form I had never understood and always avoided: short fiction, or the world of short stories and novellas.
With the exception of a single period when I was physically and mentally debilitated and unable to write at all, it never once crossed my mind that I might simply give up writing entirely. Plenty of time to stop writing, I remember thinking, once I’ve stopped breathing.
It didn’t take long for the pleasures and the challenges of writing in the new format to kick in: I quickly discovered the practical importance of brevity, tension, terseness, tightness of focus, and shorter word counts, all dictated by the enormous discipline entailed in switching from long, discursive narrative to tight, succinct storytelling. Both forms have their own rules and rigours, and both demand the same expertise and skill: the deceptively easy-looking techniques of using and manipulating the nuances of our magnificently complex language to generate structure that is silken and transparent in its smooth integrity.
But where to begin?
That was a tough one, because I had no idea of where I actually wanted to go. I found—and sometimes I still find—the prospect of “shortness” intimidating, never having felt a need to constrain the free-wheeling narrative style that I had developed over a lifetime. Reorienting myself to work with greater focus in order to say as much with fewer words was, almost instantly, an existential dilemma for me. How could I abandon all my stylistic quirks and still remain the writer I had been? I fretted about that for months, beating myself up, until I remembered a short story that I had written years earlier for a long since defunct American publication called Paradox, a magazine of speculative and historical fiction. It was the only short story I had ever written, and I wrote it because I was intrigued at the time by how the kernel of the tale had first occurred to me. And it had actually been published! And long afterwards, just before I fell ill, someone had wanted to reprint it, though nothing ever came of that because other things came to usurp my attention about then.
I dug up that story and read it, and was surprised to discover that it held together remarkably well for a one-off side trip. I took the time to analyze it, paying attention to what made it work, and quickly realized that it worked for precisely the same reason that my novels worked: it brought its characters instantly to life, presenting them as credible and, above all, genuinely human. And so I decided to have another go at short stories.
Since then, I’ve been beavering away happily again, confident in what I have done in creating this collection, and that original story, “Power Play,” is part of it. I have discovered, to my absolute, unanticipated delight, that this “new” medium is one to which I’ve been able to adapt with far more ease and mental satisfaction than I had ever thought possible, and the result is a growing collection of new material, far different from anything I’ve done in the past—a new body of work I’m looking forward to publishing.
This particular collection came into being because I realized that, in the course of a long and fortunate career as an internationally published author, I had never written about my boyhood in Scotland in the 1940s and ’50s. The more I thought about that, the more strangely disloyal it seemed, and as my boyhood memories returned to me, sometimes with stark clarity, I began to discern how several seminal moments had influenced the man I later became. Since then, in writing these stories and revisiting the memories that kick-started them, it became clear to me that I had been indelibly influenced by several recurrent notions and preoccupations that I had never recognized were there inside me.
I came to realize that the Elysian Fields I played in as a boy—vast tracts of cultivated, manicured acres that we took for granted and thought of, simply, as “the Estates”—were among the twentieth century’s last remaining traces of the society of aristocrats, known as the landed gentry, that had, for hundreds of years, deemed our families to be beneath them: the working classes, unfit to pass through their privileged gates except as menial servants. And even then, it was not until much later that I became aware that common working people had no rights in the face of that same sense of entitlement and privilege: no working man’s word had any validity against the laws governing property or trespass; working people, at the end of the Second World War, still had to do as they were told, and I remember seeing, in 1944, the intolerant, patriarchal old laird whose dilapidated manor house was far fallen into tree-screened decay less than half a mile from our house lash his whip across one of his farmhands who had not been quick enough to open the gate for the old man’s pony and trap. “Old Cummy,” as he was known (for Cummings), was typical of the local power brokers who owned the surrounding lands and employed working-class policemen to safeguard both their privileges and their prejudices. And so, decades later, I found myself consumed with the idea of power and how it can be exercised tyrannically by small numbers of self-serving people manipulating others on a grand scale in order to protect their own narrow interests.
Working-class people, for example, were banned from first-class railway travel in those days. Working-class people didn’t register in the awareness of the governing classes. They simply couldn’t win at anything significant until they experienced two successive world wars and returned home from each of them only to discover that nothing had changed and their sacrifices were largely perceived as useless, taken for granted by their so-called betters. Only then, like the angry Samson, did they mobilize twentieth-century socialism and use it to pull the entire patriarchal edifice down around them in ruins, in Scotland, anyway. But as recently as the early 1950s, the same old rules applied: in religious matters, in the administration of criminal justice, in banking, in school segregation, in dress and deportment, and in the carefully engineered “sectarian violence” fostered by leaders on both sides to keep Protestants and Catholics constantly and increasingly at odds with one another. All of these things were endemic to the class system practised in Scotland—and throughout Britain, if the truth be told.
One of the most telling condemnations I ever heard on that topic of class distinction was voiced by the actor Michael Caine. He had been receiving plaudits from a TV interviewer on 60 Minutes for his standout performance in the movie Zulu—his first major film role—as the young lieutenant who received the Victoria Cross for his heroic defence of a river ford called Rorke’s Drift, on the border of Natal and Zululand, where he rallied a tiny garrison of 137 men to withstand a 4,000-strong force of Zulu warriors in the Anglo-Zulu War of 1879. Caine said that the situation was ironic, because had the movie been filmed in the UK, he would never have been allowed, as a common Londoner with a Cockney accent, to play the role of Lieutenant Gonville Bromhead. And there, in a nutshell, he encapsulated the suffocating, pretentious hypocrisy of the British class system and the powers of perception, patronage, and paternalism it was established to defend. The mantra of that system, “Do as you’re told,” is the very antithesis of “Here, let me show you.”
That paternalism, combined over centuries with the British mythical stiff upper lip and dour Scots-Calvinist puritanism, generated in Britain, and far more noticeably in Scotland, a national inability to express emotion or to display love, warmth, or affection, even among close family members. Anger and resentment were easy. Love or tolerance, not quite so simple. The alienation between fathers and sons is a time-honoured trope in literature, but nowhere, I believe, has it ever come close to depicting the total lack of overt affection, or even visible paternal pride, that existed in the Scotland wherein my friends and I spent our boyhood. For affection, understanding, and real companionship in the late 1940s and early 1950s, all of us, without exception, turned away from our families and
That’s where all these stories sprang from, and I had no idea they were ready to emerge. I wrote them remembering the way things had been in my own boyhood, and the more I recalled, the deeper I dug and the more conscientiously I wrote. And now all those themes, memes, and dreams are no longer locked inside me. They are out in the open, in this collection, because every story in here had its genesis, one way or another, in wartime and postwar Scotland.
I hope you’ll enjoy them. I’ll have more for you soon.
Jack Whyte
Kelowna, BC, Canada
July 2020
Power Play
The seed that generated this story, set in the ancient Rome that motivates my creative Muse more than any other venue or time period, was planted during my mid-teens in Scotland, when one of the members of my high school English class, who typified the kind of snooty, pontificating jerk that everyone loves to detest, came home from a weekend camping trip with some evidently benighted, moronic neo-Nazi friends and presented me (at third hand) with my very first conspiracy theory—which he presented as well-documented, undeniable fact—that a secret international cabal of Jewish bankers controlled the fiduciary affairs of the entire world. Even at the age of fifteen I knew better than to believe that or to let it pass unchallenged, and so I got into one of the few serious blood-drawing fist fights of my youth.
I never really thought about it again until the summer of 2009, when I heard another Scotsman spout the same unconscionably racist bigotry that had disgusted me so many years earlier. This time, though, the speaker was someone who, in my opinion, should have known much better and should have kept what were to us his unsuspected prejudices tightly stifled.
We had been talking idly over a cold beer that day—it was summer and we’d been playing golf—first about the trappings and then about the reality of power and how people perceive it and achieve it, and that’s when the garbage erupted. This time, however, instead of fighting over it, I wrote the piece that follows.
They were everywhere, Levi thought, everywhere he looked and everywhere he could not see. Romans. The entire country was in their grip, a pigeon in the mouth of a cat.
He turned away from the window, with its view of the drab, brown-clad legionaries on parade across the street, and looked back towards the man seated behind the table with his neat piles of rolled parchments. In the dust-covered street, a donkey brayed, its ugly hacking cough close enough and loud enough to cover even the sounds of the hawkers and peddlers.
Levi waited for the noise to subside, conscious of the deep stillness within the chamber. The only motion in the room was a mere suggestion: a stationary dance of dust motes in the one beam of bright light that blazed through the window, painting a bright slash across the floor and illuminating a corner of one rug and the edge of the table. Surrounding the shimmering brilliance of the sharp-edged swath, the rest of the room seemed dark.
It was a bare chamber, yet sumptuous. Two chairs faced the table side by side, and they were plain and uncomfortable high-backed sellae with their narrow, restrictive arms. A third chair, behind the table, was a curule, the classical Roman magisterial chair, backless, with a polished hide seat supported by curved cruciform ivory legs. The table itself, fully three paces in length, was made of solid slabs of citrus, the rarest and most expensive wood in the world, and the floor was one enormous, brilliantly coloured mosaic. One of the three rugs scattered casually on the floor was obviously Persian, its colours muted yet glowing still despite their antiquity, while another was from the fabulous Eastern Lands, silken and rich with vibrant blues and brilliant reds and yellows. The third was the entire skin of a gigantic white bear. Cured in such a way that its enormous head remained intact, this fantastic creature glared up from the floor directly in front of the table, its gaping jaws revealing teeth as long and thick as Levi’s fingers. Two marble busts, beloved of the idolatrous Romans, stood on plinths against the wall behind the table, flanking the man who sat in the ivory curule chair. He was leaning forward with his arms crossed, watching Levi closely, a small frown creasing his brow.
“You look amused, Master Levi. That’s the last thing I might have expected from a man who has failed to live up to his word and now sits before me as a delinquent debtor. Did I say something humorous?”
Levi sighed. “No, Caius Tullius. You did not. That is not within your capacity.”
The frown deepened instantly to a scowl. “What is that supposed to mean?”
Levi stepped forward and sat in one of the high-backed chairs. “It was not supposed to mean anything. It was a plain statement of fact, no more. I believe humour is alien to your nature, that is all.” His eyes were fixed on the sunbeam that stabbed through the gloom. “Look at the way the dust motes seem to dance in that beam of light.”
The other man’s eyes flicked towards the slanted golden column, then returned to Solomon Levi, betraying a spark of anger. “Have you heard even one word of what I have been saying to you, Master Levi?”
“Oh yes. I have heard and absorbed every word, including those you did not say.” The other man blinked. Levi clasped his hands over his flat stomach, interlacing his fingers. “Would you like me to repeat them? Or the sense of them as I understood them?”
Tullius’s head dipped sideways. “I would. I would indeed. Please. Surprise me.”
“You have been telling me,” Solomon Levi said, “that you are about to terminate my livelihood, casting me and all who depend on me into destitution, and inviting me to believe that you have no choice in the matter.”
The Roman’s eyebrows rose. “Did I say that?”
“Yes. Not in those precise words, but we both know that is what you’ve been saying for the past hour.”
“I see. Then why are you not angry?”
Levi stifled a sigh. “Why should I be angry? What would I achieve? There is nothing I can do to stop you, other than by acceding to your demands for more money, and I am powerless to do that.”
“Ah! Powerless. I see.” Tullius looked away, his gaze drifting towards the window and the street outside. “Tell me, Master Levi, do you understand what power is, what it represents?”
“Of course I do. It represents itself, for itself, by its very existence. I also know enough about it to know I am powerless to influence your evident decision.”
The straying eyes snapped back to Levi. “What decision? What have I decided? I spoke of no decision.”
“Words, Caius Tullius! Your words, spoken or not, would be pointless and specious in this instance. You did not use them, admittedly, but you had no need of them. Your nature speaks for you.” Levi rose to his feet. “I have no time for this. Enjoy your victory, Caius Tullius, before your mouth fills with the taste of the ashes you have just acquired. I must pay off my men, as far as I am able, and see them settled as well as I can before I conclude my affairs here and move on. Good day to you.” He moved towards the door.
“Wait!”
Levi half turned. “Why? There is no more to be said.”
“Perhaps not. But please, sit. Permit me to think for a moment.”
As Levi resumed his seat, his face expressionless, Tullius got up from his own chair and crossed slowly to the window. He was a handsome man, tall and still young enough to look youthful, although the weight of his responsibilities was beginning to show itself in the stoop of his wide shoulders and the slight but clearly graven lines on his face. Levi’s eyes missed nothing of the man, noting that the price of the clothes he wore so casually could have sheltered and fed whole families of the city’s poor for months.
“You are a strange man, Solomon Levi. One, I suspect, with few equals among those supposed to be your peers. I am tempted to . . . be lenient with you.” He swung away from the window, returned to his chair at the table, and looked Levi straight in the eye. “I almost said ‘to appease you.’ Now why would I wish to say that?” He paused, then resumed in a brisker tone. “On the matter of the moneys, unfortunately there is little I can do. As you so aptly pointed out, I, too, like every other man, have my masters, to whom I am accountable. On some of the other matters, however, we may be able to arrive at a compromise.”
